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EFFICIENT RELIGION 



GEORGE ARTHUR ANDREWS 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



BY 

GEORGE ARTHUR ANDREWS 

AtTTHOB OF "what IS ESSENTIAL." 






HODDER & STOUGHTON 

NEW YORK 

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



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Copyright, 1912, 
By GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



©CI.A328640 



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PREFACE 

The temper of the present age is utilita- 
rian. Everybody is looking for results. 
The question of utility is asked shrewdly by 
those who seek profit, sometimes cynically 
by those who indulge excessively in pleas- 
ures, and of ttimes desperately by those who 
struggle in the meshes of stressful condi- 
tions. 

If the religion of Jesus is to maintain 
and increase its influence with the practical 
men and women of this century, it must 
do more than to demonstrate its truth, more 
than to reveal its beauty, more even than 
to point with becoming pride to its twenty 
centuries of successful history ; it must show 
its present helpfulness. 

"What is its use?" "What is it good 
for?" "What can it do?" These are the 
questions which men and women, too, are 
asking to-day. To suggest the answer to 

[5] 



PREFACE 

these questions is the object of this httle 
book. No effort is herein made to add to 
the accumulating mass of evidential testi- 
mony to the helpfulness of Christ's religion. 
The aim here is to suggest a basis in reason 
for the acceptance of such testimony. 

Our task is partly that of the sifter. We 
must seek to winnow the grain of the prac- 
tically beneficial in the religion of Jesus 
from the chaff of those beliefs and prac- 
tices which are pathetically unhelpful. But 
our task is also that of the moulder, and of 
the baker. For we are to try to shape the 
sifted grain into one homogeneous whole 
and to present it in a form that may, it is 
hoped, prove wholesome and nutritious to 
some doubting, careworn, sinful soul, hun- 
gry for the "Bread of Life." 



[6] 



Chapter. 

I Profitable Faith . 






Paoe. 

. 11 


II 


Practicable Love . 






. 27 


III 


Prevailing Prayer . 






. 43 


IV 


Saving Forgiveness . 






. 57 


V 


Abundant Health . 






. 77 


VI 


Sufficient Consolation 






93 


VII 


Sustaining Strength 






111 


VIII 


Satisfying Joy . 






127 


IX 


Attainable Peace . 






141 


X 


Achieving Power . 






159 



[7] 



PROFITABLE FAITH 



CHAPTER ONE 



" If a brother be naked, and in lack of daily food, and one 
of you say unto him, *Go in peace, be ye warmed and filled ;' 
and yet ye give him not the things needful to the body, what 
doth it profit ? Can faith save him ?" — James 2 : 14-16. 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



PROFITABLE FAITH 

When Henry Van Dyke wrote his true 
and compelling book, "The Gospel for an 
Age of Doubt," he spoke to thinkers of 
the intellectual appeal of the religion of 
Christ. But the blackest doubt is not the 
fruit of thought; it has its genesis in phys- 
ical conditions and in moral conditions. 

To-day the great multitudes of those 
who feel no concern for the religion of 
Jesus are people who never think very 
deeply upon any subject. They are those 
who are altogether unfamiliar with the 
written philosophies of men, some of them 
even unfamiliar with the deeper truths of 
the written revelation of God's Word. 
They are not so much thinkers as doers. 
They are not students, but actors. 

The parts which most of these actors 

[11] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



must play upon the stage of life are very 
limited. Their relations to the other actors 
on the stage they do not very clearly un- 
derstand, and their relation to the Author 
of the play is wholly uncomprehended. In- 
deed, they cannot be sure that the play has 
any Author at all. To these who see the 
stage only from behind the scenes all is lit- 
ter and confusion. They stumble through 
their minor parts when by necessity they 
must, but they do not know what it is all 
about; perhaps, indeed, the most of them 
never even question what it is about. 

Here is the dumb, unspoken unbelief, 
created not by intellectual questioning, but 
by untoward circumstances. It is the un- 
belief not of the profound scholar, but of 
the uncomprehending child. Yet this stolid, 
unthinking unbelief presents the most se- 
rious of all obstacles to the advancement of 
true Christian faith. 

When a child has reached for the tooth- 
some sweetmeat and has found his hand re- 
strained, he is in no mood to be convinced 
by argument that his father is good. When 
[12] 



PROFITABLE FAITH 



he has touched the bright thing that looked 
so pretty, and has been burned thereby, 
one cannot reasonably expect, while his 
body suffers, that his mind will readily com- 
prehend the truth of love. 

Just so when men in our present indus- 
trial system toil and sweat for a competence 
and find their hands held back, one cannot 
expect them, in the misery of their poverty, 
to believe very strongly in a God who loves 
them. And when other men have touched 
some sinful thing that seemed attractive, the 
immediate effect of their consequent suffer- 
ing will not likely be a resplendent faith in 
a merciful Providence. 

They do not think the unbelief. They feel 
it. It has become a part of their experience. 
They have become habituated to it. Ex- 
actly as they become accustomed to the in- 
difference of the prosperous classes and of 
the moral classes, and to the stringent com- 
petition of the members of their own class, 
so they become accustomed to expect no help 
from any divine power, no help and no 
mercy. 

[13] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



This is only a partial view of the present 
day's practical unbelief. By the side of the 
many toiling, suffering, sinful people who 
experience an unbelief in God which they 
never express, we must place all those who, 
in prosperity, flippantly ignore God; and 
with both classes, if we would view the sit- 
uation in its entirety, we must include the 
multitudes of those who are neither at the 
top nor at the bottom of the industrial scale, 
but who are necessarily busy with the affairs 
of the earth, and who must, or at least do, 
concentrate all their powers of effort in the 
struggle for material things. Finally, we 
must include in this great company of un- 
thinking unbelievers the thousands of men 
and women of all classes and conditions 
whose lives are one continuous cry of bodily 
anguish, of soul loneliness, or, worse still, 
one unbroken stupor of sensuous indulgence. 

Are all these people indifferent to Christ's 
religion because they have been reading 
Thomas Paine or Robert Ingersoll? Is it 
because they have discerned certain illogical 
conclusions in the prevailing systems of 
[14] 



PROFITABLE FAITH 



Christian thought? Have they become es- 
tranged from rehgion because of the hard 
fought but now dead issue between rehgion 
and science? None of these reasons ex- 
plains their indifference". It is appaUing to 
think how many men and women there are 
in this world of God's who do not vitally 
believe in Him, not because they have 
thought themselves away from Him, but be- 
cause they have never felt themselves in 
Him. 

And the Church for centuries has been 
offering to these a system of thought, bid- 
ding them in the name of Saint Augustine 
or some other saint to believe something, in- 
stead of telling them in the name of the 
Master to receive something and to do some- 
thing. 

If Christian faith be only or principally 
a system of thought, it can never become 
efficient in the lives of these who cannot 
think, or do not think, or will not think. 
This is a proposition which seems self-evi- 
dent. To present to these unthinking toilers 
and idlers, strugglers and sufferers, any 
[15] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



theological view of the atonement, is to offer 
them stones for bread. The attempt to 
demonstrate to them the love of God by a 
process of syllogistic reasoning is like the 
attempt to demonstrate a problem in the dif- 
ferential calculus to the child who can add 
two and two only by the aid of his fingers, 
or to the man who, in the stringency of his 
struggle for existence, or in the debauchery 
of his self-indulgence has long ago forgot- 
ten all the higher mathematics which he ever 
learned. 

Herein is suggested the cause of the par- 
tial failure of the Church of Christ to win 
and to hold the great majority of the breth- 
ren of Christ. The Church has been prone 
to make the acceptance of Christ's religion 
dependent upon thought. It therefore has 
been powerless to promote the true Chris- 
tian faith in the lives both of those who in 
the exigencies of their material conditions 
cannot think, and of those who in the ab- 
sorption of their pursuit of material things 
do not think. 

There are encouraging signs, however, 
[16] 



PROFITABLE FAITH 



that the Church is beginning to rectify its 
mistake. One of the most encouraging of 
these signs is the modern interest of the 
Church in men. The "Men and Religion" 
movement of this present day, with its em- 
phasis upon practical Christianity, must be 
considered as an attempt to rescue the re- 
ligion of Jesus from the realm of intellectual 
thought, and to bring it into the realm of 
efficient action. 

The definition of Christian faith towards 
which the Church of to-day most happily is 
tending is just this. Christian faith is 
simply the faith which inspired the Ufe- 
work of Christ. It is the consciousness of 
filial relationship with God, the conscious- 
ness, therefore, of help from God and of 
duty towards God. 

iThis consciousness may be only experi- 
enced. There may be those who cannot ex- 
press it in words, those even who may not 
intelligently apprehend the thing which they 
feel. The child does not need to apprehend 
clearly the idea of motherhood in order to 
be conscious of filial relationship with his 

[17] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



mother. He may not know enough even to 
understand that the woman who succours 
him and who cares for him is his mother. 
Surely there will always be depths in her 
maternal love which his intellect can never 
fathom. But when the child goes to his 
mother for needed nourishment and comfort, 
and when a little later he goes out to obey 
that mother in loyalty and in true devotion, 
he is acting upon his faith in her. His in- 
ability to reduce the idea of motherhood to 
an intellectual formula in no way affects 
either the reality of his faith in her, or its 
efficiency in his own life. 

We must separate the concept of Chris- 
tian faith from all attempted theological 
definitions and intellectual systems, and we 
must make it something as simple and as 
efficient as the Uttle child's consciousness of 
the care of the mother who loves him and 
whom, therefore, he must obey. We may ad- 
mit that the intellectual definitions have their 
value to some people, but we must see 
clearly that if the religion of Jesus is to be 
of use to the multitudes who need it most, 
[18] 



PROFITABLE FAITH 



it must be based only upon the child-like 
confidence in Him who nourishes and com- 
forts and guides. 

This faith, unexpressed in words, it may- 
be inexpressible, unformulated and unsyste- 
matized, is the faith that is profitable. It 
will do for the children of the Heavenly 
Father just what it does for the children 
of earthly parents, it will send them to 
Him who they know will nourish and 
strengthen. It will, therefore, first of all, 
cause them to grow. In His nourishing 
care it will bring them out of the feebleness 
of immaturity into the strength of manhood 
and womanhood. It will take away the 
hurt of the pain, and the sting of the dis- 
appointment. It will make their lives pur- 
poseful and useful. It will bring them into 
that kind of a life which Jesus sometimes 
called the "life abundant" and sometimes 
the "life eternal," the life of vitality and 
helpfulness, the life whose service is of value 
now and whose influence never ends. 

We can make this faith profitable to the 
lives of others, too. We can bring others 
[19] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



into this faith, to revert to our parallelism, 
precisely as a child is brought into the con- 
sciousness of his human parents' nourishing, 
strengthening, and guiding love. We can 
do it by ministering to men's present needs. 
The way is not by words, but by deeds, not 
so much by instructions and sermons as by 
sympathy and helpfulness. 

This was Christ's method of bringing men 
into profitable faith in a Father of love. 
He fed the hungry. He healed the sick. 
He comforted the sorrowful. He forgave 
the sinful. By such a ministry to the ex- 
isting needs of men. He revealed to them 
the love of God. He was not content to 
demonstrate God's love to those who were 
able and willing to think about it. He acted 
that love for those who needed to experi- 
ence it. 

The Church must insist upon Christ's 
method of promoting faith if it would make 
that faith profitable. Faith in God can be 
made an efficient force in the lives of the 
unhappy and the unsatisfied, the careless 
idler and the absorbed toiler, the discontented 
[20] 



PROFITABLE FAITH 



struggler for wealth and the disappointed 
struggler for pleasure, only in this one way, 
by the Christian's imitation of the method of 
the Master. 

This man in our community, this neigh- 
bour of ours, this brother for whom Christ 
lived and died, is caught and held fast in the 
grinding wheels of our industrial machinery. 
He can do only a certain kind of labour, but 
he is by no means free to labour where he 
will. He is in bondage on the one hand to 
the organization of capital, and on the other 
to the organization of labour. He is, as it 
were, caught between the whirring wheels 
of the increasing needs of his family and the 
increasing cost of everything that his family 
needs. Now the labouring man is not es- 
tranged from the efficient religion of Jesus 
Christ. It is true that labour organizations 
have sometimes expressed their antagonism 
to the Church of Christ. But the ideal 
of the real religion of Jesus was very like 
the ideal for which these labour unions are 
striving, the ideal of justice, equity, free- 
dom, and brotherly love. 
[21] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



Christian faith can help this labouring 
man, the efficient faith, efficiently imparted. 
It is only that empty repetition of meaning- 
less words, so sarcastically described by the 
author of the Epistle of James, that has 
failed to help him. Any man who will give 
his sympathetic attention to the stressful 
conditions under which this labouring man 
must live and toil, any Christian who will 
try to better those conditions, will help this 
man into that faith in God which will profit 
him both in this world and in the world which 
is to come. Help this man to what he 
knows he needs, and he will be helped to the 
satisfaction of the greater need which now 
he may not realize. 

All about us, too, are the sinners; 
the brutalized, ostracized, flagrant sinners. 
These people are not so very unlike the rest 
of mankind, except that they are unclothed 
by social customs and unwarmed by social 
sympathy. It is because of the nakedness 
of their souls that they give license to their 
lower passions and appetites. The man who 
indulges in gross sins is probably not so bad 
[22] 



PROFITABLE FAITH 



in God's sight as the man who dehberately 
plans to profit from that indulgence. Yet 
society, and sometimes the very Church of 
God, has shunned the man who sins and con- 
doned the man who has enticed him to sin. 

Can faith save both of these men? Yes, 
the efficient faith, efficiently induced. So 
long as Christians are content to say to such 
in mere words, — "be moral," "be respect- 
able," "believe in Christ and get converted," 
it will not help them to the life that is lived 
in God. But when Christians become ready 
to try to clothe their nakedness with the 
warmth of their sympathy and their sacri- 
ficing ministry, when they become ready to 
do for them and are no longer content to 
talk at them, then they will help them. 

The faith of professing Christians having 
become profitable in their own lives will pro- 
duce the profitable, developing, strengthen- 
ing faith in the lives of others. 



[23] 



PRACTICABLE LOVE 



CHAPTER TWO 



"A new commandment I give unto you. That ye love one 
another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another." 
—John 13 ; 34. 



PRACTICABLE LOVE 

When Jesus was teaching His disciples 
at Jerusalem, the government of Judea was 
controlled by the greed of an unscrupulous 
imperialism, and the religion of Judea had 
become the hollow form of a heartless and 
lifeless submission to law. By a system of 
unjust taxation the Roman Governor was 
robbing the people of their possessions, and 
by the pretense of religious authority the 
Jewish Sanhedrin was depriving them of 
their liberty. No wonder, then, that Christ's 
commandment to love one another was char- 
acterized by Him as new. 

But the particular company of men to 
whom this strange command was spoken, 
though living in an age of political and 
of religious selfishness, had for nearly 
three years been in fellowship with the 
Man of Love. In His presence they 
had caught occasional glimpses of a re- 
[27] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



ligion more spiritual than the literal legalism 
of their countrymen, and glimpses of a gov- 
ernment less oppressive than that of their 
conquerors. They had witnessed their Mas- 
ter's helpful sympathy for the sick and the 
unfortunate; they had seen His tender for- 
giveness of the sinful. More significant still, 
they had felt His love for themselves, and 
the love had had its inevitable effect upon the 
development of their characters. It had 
changed the "sons of thunder" into teach- 
able and lovable disciples. It had made the 
doubting Thomas the loyal friend, who was 
ready to die with his Master in an apparently 
foolish and forlorn cause. It had sur- 
charged the heart of the impetuous Peter so 
that he could confidently declare himself the 
unfailing champion, vowing that though he 
should stand alone, he would yet stand 
boldly by his Master's side to the very 
death. 

Yet it must be remembered that there 

were some things that the love of Jesus had 

not accomplished for these men. It had 

made them neither omniscient nor omnipo- 

[28] 



PRACTICABLE LOVE 



tent. It had not taken away all the self- 
seeking from James and John, nor all the 
doubt from Thomas, nor all the cowardice 
from Peter. The disciples were still just 
mortal men with varying characteristics and 
many human weaknesses. They were still 
slow of understanding and slow of heart. 

We know that they were slow of under- 
standing because, in spite of their fellowship 
with the Man of Love, they had as yet no 
conception of His religion other than some 
slight modification of the worship of Je- 
hovah, through obedience to Mosaic law. 
We know it, too, because they had as yet im- 
agined no government other than the tem- 
poral government of Israel's expected Mes- 
siah and Deliverer. We know they were 
slow of heart because they were still selfish 
enough to desire for themselves the first 
places of honour and of riches in the new 
government for which they hoped; because 
they were weak enough to sleep while Jesus 
sufi*ered alone in Gethsemane, and because 
they were craven enough to desert Him 
when He was taken captive in the garden. 
[29] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



Evidently, in spite of the years of associa- 
tion with the love of Jesus, the command- 
ment enjoining their own love was some- 
what new even to the disciples. 

Is it still a new commandment in the twen- 
tieth century? The modern republican 
form of government has not removed from 
men all opportunity for self-aggrandize- 
ment. Political parties now struggle for 
the supremacy which once by inheritance was 
enjoyed by emperors, but the party in con- 
trol still uses its power for its own ends. 
Under the pretense of government the op- 
pression of the poor is even now legalized, 
and it makes little difference whether that 
oppression be accomplished by unjust tax- 
ation, or by the tariff-protected, money- 
bought power of corporations. Who would 
dare to say that our present age is not pro- 
ducing politicians who are as thoughtless of 
the rights of those whom they govern as 
was the cruel, greedy, and cowardly Roman 
Pilate? 

And what about the professed religion of 
this twentieth century? What about the 
[30] 



PRACTICABLE LOVE 



slowness of comprehension and the slowness 
of heart of those who have behind them, 
not three years of association with the liv- 
ing Jesus, it is true, but twenty centuries of 
the history of the operation of God's love 
through Christ Jesus our Lord? Have the 
minds of these modern disciples completely 
grasped the truth that Christ's Kingdom is 
not the kingdom of the worldly prosperity, 
say of some Church? Have these no desire 
for the chief places of temporal power and 
of influence? Are not some of them still 
sleeping soundly while their brethren and 
Christ's brethren in agony sweat blood? Are 
all these free from the just charge of the 
desertion of Christ's cause when it has 
become unpopular, and of the denial of 
Christ's cause when its confession has en- 
tailed inconvenience and imagined danger? 
Our rehgion can no longer be considered 
as a mere matter of punctilious obedience 
to ceremonial law. We have reached the 
time when it has become the proper and 
conventional thing for religious people to 
express their love for God and for Christ. 

I 31 ] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



But just to love God and to adore Christ 
for His sacrifice is not precisely the import 
of Christ's new commandment. He said 
men were to love their fellows. Must this 
commandment still be denominated as some- 
thing new and strange? Indeed, so new is 
this commandment because so very imper- 
fectly has it been obeyed that many men to- 
day are declaring that it cannot be obeyed. 
Twenty centuries of the practice of perfect 
obedience to that command would have 
brought the entire world to complete recog- 
nition of its practicability. But twenty cen- 
turies of slowness of comprehension and of 
slowness of heart have brought us, God save 
the mark, only to the place where thought- 
ful men are questioning the commandment's 
practical utility. 

We must ask, then, another question. Is 
the commandment, which is still new, im- 
practicable in this twentieth century of ap- 
parent selfishness? Before we hastily an- 
swer this question in the affirmative, however, 
we must be sure that we understand what 
we mean by the term "love," and we must 
[32] 



PRACTICABLE LOVE 



be equally sure that we are looking in the 
right direction for the expected results from 
the practice of love. 

If Christian love were only an emotion 
of affection, the commandment's universal 
application would indeed be an impossibil- 
ity. Affection cannot be practiced by all 
men with reference to all other men. Men 
of antipathetic temperaments cannot have 
an affection for each other any more than 
an acid can have an affinity for an alkali. 
If Christ's commandment, to "love one 
another," means that we are to desire in- 
timate, lover-like relations with all men, if 
it means that we are actually to long for 
the companionship of the dirty and the de- 
graded, the diseased and the sinful, then, 
frankly, the command is impossible of ful- 
fillment. Human affection is the natural 
product of human affinities. And affinity, 
a term which unfortunately is sometimes 
loosely used, the real affinity of human souls 
is something created by God. It is not some- 
thing that can be commanded even by God's 
Son. Even Jesus Himself seems naturally 
[ 33 ] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



and inevitably to have had warmer affec- 
tion for some people than for others. He 
seems to have preferred the society of John 
to that of Judas. He loved Mary and 
Martha of the Uttle home in Bethany with 
a satisfying affection that He could not pos- 
sibly have felt for the scribes and the Phari- 
sees and for the publicans and sinners. 

We are forced to conclude, then, that the 
love commanded by Jesus is not an emotion 
of affection, but only and always a principle 
of action. Let us make the definition com- 
plete and specific. Christian love is the 
principle of benevolent action. When a 
man has acknowledged to himself a desire 
to help others and has converted that desire 
into a motive of service, he has accepted into 
his life the love which is the very dynamic 
of the Christian religion. 

We must seek the fruit of such love not 
in a man's feelings, but in his deeds. 
Though he may not naturally care to asso- 
ciate with the dirty and the degraded, does 
he try to cleanse and to elevate them? If 
he tries to help them he is obeying Christ's 
[34] 



PRACTICABLE LOVE 



commandment of love. If he is content to 
leave them alone in their unfortunate con- 
ditions, he is not obeying the commandment. 
The test of the practice of Christian love is 
just as simple as this. 

It must be observed, too, that there are 
limitations to the effect of such love upon 
him who really possesses it and practices it. 
The possession and practice of Christian 
love will not make one omniscient and om- 
nipotent. It will not destroy one's individ- 
uality, nor will it mould all men according 
to one fasliion. The impetuosity of the 
Peters will still persist. The questioning 
minds of the Thomases will still ask, 
"Why?" and "How?" It may be that some- 
thing of the desire for personal preferment 
may remain in the hearts of the sons of 
Zebedee. 

This limitation, both of the nature and 
of the fruits of love, indicates that the pos- 
session of Christian love is not incompatible 
with the possession of a sturdy selfhood. A 
Christ-like interest in the betterment of one's 
fellows is by no means the contradiction of 
[35] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



a natural, God-commanded interest in one's 
own betterment. The former interest is not 
the contradiction of the latter, but its supple- 
ment. To seek for one's self is the demand 
of a law of human life. To seek for others 
is the added demand of a higher law of 
human life. The equable adjustment of 
these two God-given commands is alike the 
problem of the indvidual's life and the prob- 
lem of the industrial and pohtical life of 
nations. 

Right here a ray of hope penetrates the 
dark picture of the world's selfishness. The 
apparent undue prevalence of self-seeking 
does not force us to admit that men cannot 
be actuated by love, nor even that they are 
not in some measure already actuated by 
love. The glaring selfishness is observable 
for the most part only because so many men 
have not learned how to adjust their clam- 
ouring love impulses to their insistent 
self-seeking impulses. Men are not in gen- 
eral indifferent to their neighbours' welfare, 
but by the exigencies of modern conditions 
they are forced to give themselves with ap- 
[36] 



PRACTICABLE LOVE 



parent forgetfulness of others to the ad- 
vancement of their own welfare. 

How to add the command of Christ de- 
manding love for others to the command of 
Nature demanding self -protection and self- 
advancement, that is the problem which must 
be solved by those who would make the re- 
ligion of Jesus of real value to the toiling, 
struggling, competing men of this busy 
twentieth century. It is a problem in addi- 
tion, and not in subtraction. It is not how 
to make men think less of themselves, but 
how to make them think more of others. As 
the Golden Rule by implication expresses it, 
men are to be taught to treat others not 
better than they treat themselves, but as well. 
"Do unto others as ye would that men 
should do unto you." This "golden rule" 
commandment of Jesus is exactly synony- 
mous with His "love" commandment. To 
love one another, that is, to desire to help one 
another, in its operation is just that treat- 
ment of others which squares with the Gol- 
den Rule. 

When we thus understand the meaning 
[37] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



and the expected results of Christian love, let 
us not at all be discouraged by the evidence 
of the selfishness and greed that surrounds 
us. For in spite of the apparent selfishness, 
in spite of much real selfishness, there was 
never a time before this twentieth century 
when men were so generally engaged in 
obeying this new commandment of Christ. 
In answer to him who declares Christian 
love to be impracticable, show him the hos- 
pitals and endowed schools, the public li- 
braries and the social settlements, the houses 
of refuge and reform. Tell this man of the 
renowned philanthropists who, it is true, 
have become great in self-seeking industry 
and powerful in the selfish accummulation 
of wealth, but who are sharing the product 
of their greatness and their power with 
others. Tell him, too, of the multitudes of 
the unknown philanthropists who are also 
competing with their fellows for their own 
advancement, but who nevertheless are shar- 
ing with others the products of their 
smaller achievements. Remind this cynic 
that men are working for themselves because 
[38] 



PRACTICABLE "LOVE 



they must, but show him how, at the same 
time, they are working for others because 
they would. Admit that men are slow of 
understanding and slow of heart, mortal 
men all of them, of individual peculiarities 
and of many human frailties. But make 
this doubter see that the impulse of obedi- 
ence to the law of love is inherent within 
them; and that the fruit of that love is 
not lacking in their lives, so long as they 
but try to give to a neighbour in need even 
the cup of cold water in the spirit of the 
serving Christ. 

Christian love can be practiced because 
it is being practiced every day. It must be 
practiced, because it is a God-commanded 
law of life. It will be practiced to the bene- 
fit of all of God's children so long as God is 
God, for God Himself is love. 

Here, enwrapped in the very nature of 
God, is the promise of the practical efficiency 
of every act of love. He who does a loving 
deed for his neighbour in need, accomplishes 
three things. He lifts himself nearer to 
the Father whose child he is. He brings re- 
[39] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



lief and happiness to his brother who is also 
God's child. And he helps to induce in his 
brother's heart the consciousness of the God 
who cares. 

**Who gives of himself with his alms feeds three, 
Himself, his hungering neighbour, and Me." 



[40] 



PREVAILING PRAYER 



CHAPTER THREE 



"All things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, 
ye shall receive." — Matthew 21 : 22. 



PREVAILING PRAYER 

A Religion without prayer is an anomaly. 
A prayer without a reasonable assurance of 
its satisfying answer is an absurdity. The 
religion of Jesus, to maintain and to increase 
its influence among men, must not only teach 
them how to pray ; it must give to them the 
assurance of the efficacy of their prayers. 

There are current in these modern times 
two objections to prayer, whose statements 
must necessarily be in philosophical terms, 
but whose influence is felt by many people 
w^ho have never even heard of their philoso- 
phy. The objections are both based upon 
the truth of the immutable laws of nature. 

The first objection assumes that nature, 
in its immutability, is fatalistic. What is, 
must be. What will be, cannot be avoided. 
By the operation of the law of gravity, when 
a man steps out of the top-story window of 
one of our modern skyscraping buildings, 
he will fall to the ground. He will fall just 
[43] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



the same whether his last words be a prayer 
or a curse. By the operation of the law of 
the "survival of the fittest," the strong and 
the industrious will succeed, the weak and 
the indolent will fail, and both success and 
failure are apparently independent of men's 
petitions to God. By the inevitableness of 
disease and of death the man exposed to 
contagion is liable to become ill, whether he 
be a man of prayer or a man of sin; and 
when his time comes to die, each man, in 
spite of his piteous pleading, must go out 
alone upon the unknown journey. Since 
all men are in the hands of relentless, fatal- 
istic laws, of what use is prayer? 

The second objection based upon the same 
truth of nature's laws assumes the benefi- 
cence of nature and of nature's God. His- 
tory has demonstrated that seed-time and 
harvest shall not fail. Experience has 
proven that the seed planted by the prayer- 
less man is as productive as that planted by 
him who consciously communes with the 
Creator. The broken bone will knit whether 
the bone belongs to the irreverent sinner or 
[44] 



PREVAILING PRAYER 



to the praying saint. Besides, we have it 
from the very teaching of the Bible itself 
that the God manifested in benevolent na- 
ture is the God of mercy and of love, and 
that He is no respecter of persons. "He 
maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on 
the good, and sendeth rain on the just and 
on the unjust." Since God will do for men 
all He can do for them anyway, why should 
they pray to Him? 

Of this latter familiar objection there is 
a slight modification induced by a most beau- 
tiful religious trust. This modification 
makes prayer to God not only unnecessary, 
but really unfilial. What human father, it 
is argued, who really loves his children, needs 
to be asked to bestow the blessings of his 
love? Is not the very petition itself a sug- 
gestion that the child doubts the parental 
care? Why, then, should a trusting child 
of God insult his Father's love by petition? 

Those who call themselves Christians can- 
not avoid these well-founded objections to 
prayer. Nor can they evade the objection 
by the sophistical retort that prayer in its 
[ 45 ] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



essence is not petitionary, but only commun- 
ional. To tell any man that he can com- 
mune with God, but that he cannot or should 
not ask God for the things which he needs 
and wants, makes the permitted communion 
most unreal and artificial. If the term 
"communion with God" has any vital sig- 
nificance at all, it must include the unre- 
served outpouring of the human heart into 
the Heart Divine. Certainly no child can 
properly be said to be in communion with his 
human parent if the child's conversation 
with his parent must be limited to the dis- 
cussion of the generalities of faith and ado- 
ration and love. The child must be able to 
tell his father all that is in his own heart. 
He must be free to name his specific dis- 
tresses and his specific desires, and the com- 
munion is not complete unless the child can 
expect from his father specific sympathy 
and specific help. Leave petitionary prayer 
out of the idea of communion with God 
and we have no real communion left. 

Here, then, is our dilemma. On the one 
hand, we Christians of the present day can- 
[46] 



PREVAILING PRAYER 



not deny the truth of the changelessness and 
the beneficence of nature's laws. Our en- 
tire lives are lived in bondage to those laws. 
We are sustained, developed, and matured 
by their blessings. On the other hand, we 
Christians must assert the necessity and the 
efficacy of petitionary prayer, or we shall 
have no sure foundation for the fabric of our 
religion. We must therefore meet these 
objectors to prayer on their own ground. 
The challenge which they have laid down we 
must accept. If we are to make the religion 
of Jesus of real value to these doubters and 
to multitudes of others who, perhaps, have 
only felt the doubt which they have never 
formulated, we must show the profit of 
prayer not in spite of the immutability of 
law, but because of it. 

When our task is thus clearly stated, we 
must admit at once that certain prevalent 
conceptions of prayer are both untenable 
and unhelpful. Prayer is not the attempt 
of the finite will to change the will of God. 
Perhaps too many of the prayers which are 
offered, both in public and in private, resem- 

[47] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



ble the petulant teasing of wilful and selfish 
infants. The expectation that God will make 
us His special favorites, immune from sor- 
row and sin and exempt from the punish- 
ment of sin, simply because we ask Him to 
do so is as foreign to, the true conception of 
prayer as the selfishness underlying the ex- 
pectation is foreign to the nature of God. 
No effort of the finite will can change the 
Infinite will. No petition of man can ren- 
der null and void the operation of a single 
one of God's changeless and beneficent laws. 
Again, prayer is not a substitute for com- 
mon sense, nor for purposeful human en- 
deavour. If we ask God for things which 
to us seem reasonably in opposition to His 
will, as it has been revealed to us in nature 
and by science as well as in religion and by 
faith, we cannot hope for such prayer to be 
efficacious. And if we ask God to do for us 
those things which He has very evidently 
intended that we should do for ourselves, 
we shall likewise find our petitions of little 
avail. Such prayer is based not upon the 
mutual understanding and the friendship 
[48] 



PREVAILING PRAYER 



contained in the idea of communion, but 
upon an unsympathetic and unfriendly mis- 
understanding which makes real communion 
impossible. 

Prayer is always the communion of man 
with God. It includes, therefore, that kind 
of petition which is in accord with man's 
understanding of God. Its results can be 
expected only in that kind of helpfulness 
which is in accordance with God's under- 
standing of men. The ascending petition 
is human in its scope, and may therefore be 
faulty, both in matter and in manner of ex- 
pression. The resulting answer will be di- 
vine in its nature, and its helpfulness may 
therefore be in terms not immediately rec- 
ognizable by the human petitioner. Thus, 
when it is said that God sometimes seems to 
answer men's prayers with a "No" instead 
of with a "Yes," the truth in the saying is 
that the divine nature of the helpful answer 
is not immediately comprehensible to our 
human understanding. 

We must seek for the value of commun- 
ion with God exactly as we seek for the 
[49] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



value of human friendship. Only a child 
values his friend's love because of the play- 
things which the friend bestows. A mature 
person values his friends for deeper and 
dearer reasons. The true measure of the 
helpfulness of the friendship lies not in the 
things which the friend may bestow, but in 
the influences which communion with the 
friend engenders. 

So the real value of prayer is to be sought 
in a certain new efficiency which is created 
by men's communion with the power of God. 
We must not think of this new efficiency 
as something which is granted by God's 
graciousness alone, but as something which 
inevitably results from men's conscious and 
voluntary co-operation with God's power. 

There is really no power of God in all the 
world which becomes operative in its great- 
est efficiency without the co-operation of 
man. The sunshine and the rain may fall 
upon both the just and the unjust, but they 
do not accomplish a sufficient harvest until 
men till the soil and plant the seed. The 
stream runs merrily through the green 
[50] 



PREVAILING PRAYER 



meadows and the shady woods, and anybody 
who will may see its beauty and listen to its 
music, but the stream does not grind the 
miller's corn without the co-operation of the 
man at the water wheel. Steam does not 
bear heavy burdens, carry its millions of 
passengers, and convey its tons of freight 
until the steam has become harnessed and 
controlled by man. Electricity does not 
perform its varied and helpful ministry to 
the world without man's assistance. Why, 
then, should we expect God's spiritual forces 
of health and strength and trust and love 
and Hfe to become completely efficient in 
men's lives without their co-operation with 
God? 

Here is the argument by analogy. Com- 
munion with God results in a more efficient 
operation of God's spiritual forces in men's 
lives just as co-operation with Him results 
in the efficiency of His physical forces. 
And the results in the one case are really 
as natural as in the other. 

And here is the argument from experi- 
ence. Whenever men have communed with 
[51] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



God, when, trying to understand His na- 
ture of love, they have gone to Him with 
their needs and with their desires, they have 
always been helped. That is the universal 
testimony of men whose word is trustworthy. 
When such men tell us that by turning a 
button on the wall of their room they can 
flood their room with light, we believe them. 
When they tell us that by putting themselves 
m touch with the force of God's love by 
communion they are able to flood their souls 
with the light of hope and of courage and 
of new efficiency, we should likewise believe 
them. In both instances they are accom- 
plishing the helpful results in union with the 
power of God. In neither instance would 
or could the light come without their union 
with Him. 

Prayer is the human touch upon the divine 
power. The result of that touch is the divine 
power made operative and efficient. 

The divine power is always thus made 

operative. This is the conception of prayer 

and of its value which makes its helpfulness 

inevitable, just because of the immutabihty 

[52] 



PREVAILING PRAYER 



of law. The laws of spiritual life are as 
changeless as are the laws of gravity and of 
evolution. God's love in the heart is a con- 
stant force exactly as is His power in na- 
ture. The man who touches the button must 
always receive the light, for the divine power 
which he is thus utilizing never varies. 

But this conception of prayer, in accord 
with immutable law and love, suggests that 
the petitioner must act only and always in 
harmony with that love. A self-seeking 
petition is not prayer as it has been here de- 
fined, for the self-seeking petition is not in 
harmony with the immutability of love. 
When a man asks only for those things 
which shall make life easier for himself, he is 
asking for the light without the effort of the 
co-operating touch. He is asking, but not 
praying. But when the petitioner asks 
either by word or by thought for those 
things which shall make his hf e more use- 
ful, his friends' lives more useful, the entire 
family of God's children more in harmony 
with each other and with their one Father 
of love, then, so far as we can understand 
[53] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



the nature and the purposes of God's love, 
his petition is in harmony with that love. 
Then his prayer cannot be in vain. It must 
prevail. He may be mistaken in his estimate 
of the helpful value of the particular things 
which he desires. That mistake is the prod- 
uct of his human immaturity. But only let 
him be sure that he is unselfish in his peti- 
tion, and he may ask in faith without waver- 
ing, assured from the truths of nature as 
well as from the truths of revelation that 
the divine power by his co-operation will 
become efficient, even in ways, it may be, that 
he cannot quite understand. 

"Our Father," so Jesus taught His dis- 
ciples to pray, and the address necessitates 
on men's part both a filial confidence and a 
filial obedience. We can tell "Our Father" 
all our childish distresses and bring to Him 
all our childish desires, but the communion 
with "Our Father" will not be real nor will 
its results be efficacious unless we come to 
Him in humble consecration, saying, "Thy 
will be done." 



[54] 



SAVING FORGIVENESS 



CHAPTER FOUR 



"And he arose and came to his father. But while he was 
yet afar off, his father saw him, and was moved with compas- 
sion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. And the 
son said unto him, ' Father, I have sinned against heaven, and 
in thy sight ; I am no more worthy to be called thy son.' But 
the father said to his servants, * Bring forth quickly the best 
robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes 
on his feet ; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat, 
and make merry ; for this my son was dead, and is ahve again : 
he was lost, and is found.' " — Luke 15:20-24. 



SAVING FORGIVENESS 

The study of comparative religions reveals 
at least one element which is common to 
them all. Indeed, by many students this 
element is thought to be the cause of the 
very birth of religion. This common and 
perhaps causal element is due to the con- 
sciousness of all mankind of the need of 
what the Christian religion calls forgiveness. 
It is a consciousness born of the sense of 
unworthiness ; and the sense of unworthiness 
in turn has been induced by the conscious- 
ness of variance from the will and purpose 
of the Deity. 

In primitive religions the need of forgive- 
ness found its expression in crude and oft- 
times horrible forms of propitiatory rites 
and ceremonies. As civilization advanced, 
the propitiatory rites became more refined. 
There was, for instance, the substitution of 
the sacrifice of the brute animal for the hu- 
man individual, the slaughter of innocent 

[57] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



lambs and turtledoves, instead of the mur- 
der of innocent children and of hapless wo- 
men, but the object of the propitiatory rite 
remained the same — to appease the wrath of 
the God who had become estranged by men's 
sins. 

When civilization had so far advanced 
that men could no longer think of God as 
an angry Potentate, but only as a just Sov- 
ereign, the propitiation by the sacrifice of 
beasts became, in turn, displaced by the pro- 
pitiation thought to inhere in the sacrifice 
of one man once for all. But even after 
this sacrifice, "once for all," we find men 
still praying for their restoration into that 
harmony with God which they felt had been 
broken by their own wrong doings. 

At this day there are professing Chris- 
tians who do not believe in the propitiatory 
value of the death of Jesus, but they all 
believe in the need of forgiveness. There 
are those who deny the reality of sin, but 
they admit the fact of the error of sin; and 
the need of the restoration of those in error 
to the mind of God is the same need which 
[58] 



SAVING FORGIVENESS 



most Christians call the need of forgive- 
ness. 

If we could imagine that the conscious- 
ness of sin could be universally obliterated 
from men's minds, we should not thereby 
imagine the necessary end of all religion; 
but we should be imagining a modification of 
religion which it is extremely hard for us 
to understand. This religion of the millen- 
nium would be so different from any form 
of religion with which we are now familiar 
that we should hardly recognize it as re- 
ligion at all. The harmonious community 
of all men in the Spirit of God would be in 
comparison with rehgion as we know it, hke 
the heaven of our anticipation to the earth 
of our experience. 

Since in this state of existence we are but 
struggling upward to God, and in our im- 
maturity are continually failing in our 
struggles, there must always be in the re- 
ligion of this existence the desire for restora- 
tion into harmony with God. Until the 
human race becomes fully matured, whether 
in this world or in any world to come, the 
[59] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



consciousness of variation from God's will 
must always be a part of every man's experi- 
ence, and the need of restoration will always 
be a causal, or at least a contributory ele- 
ment in every man's religion. 

It has, indeed, become customary in these 
modern days for Christian preachers to neg- 
lect to address their own hearers as sinners. 
They have fallen into the way of talking to 
their hearers about the sins of those who 
never come to Church, and about the gen- 
eral sins of corporate bodies in society and 
in industry. Perhaps the Church has come 
to think of its own members and regular 
attendants as not like other men — extor- 
tioners, licentious, and openly corrupt — and 
to pray to God the Pharisee's prayer of 
gratitude for this self -righteousness, instead 
of the publican's prayer of penitence for 
sin. 

But sin in its essence is not open immor- 
ality. That is only one of the expressions 
of sin. Sin is just selfishness. Sin is plac- 
ing one's own comfort and ease and pleasure 
above the welfare of others. Sin is the self- 
[60] 



SAVING FORGIVENESS 



ishness of pride, and the selfishness of prej- 
udice. Sin is the selfishness of narrowness 
and of bigotry. It is the selfishness of in- 
diif erence and of unconcern. It is the self- 
ishness of neglected duty and of postponed 
service. Sin is any kind of selfishness that 
is ever felt or in any manner expressed. 

With this description of sin in our minds, 
we can but expect all men to admit their 
own sinfulness. But we do not, therefore, 
expect that the admission will to-day cause 
men's faces to blanch and their knees to 
tremble. Those people who are wont to look 
back with longing to the days of the anxious 
seat, and to complain that the present age 
has no sense of the enormity of sin, are mis- 
taking the sense of enormity of sin for the 
fear of the enormity of sin's punishment. 
That which has brought us to the sense of 
our guilt is not fear, but love. With Jesus' 
teachings of the Father, we can no longer 
go to the anxious seat with pale, faces, 
praying an estranged God to deliver us from 
eternal punishment. In our consciousness 
of sin we are only to go back to the waiting, 

[61] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



watching, loving Father. Our concern is 
not with the question, can we sinners, by 
any propitiation, become reconciled to an es- 
tranged Sovereign? This is our concern — 
can we sinners be restored to harmony with 
the Father who loves us? 

One of the most searching objections to 
the value of religion is the denial of the 
possibility of sin's forgiveness. With the 
truth or falsity of this denial, religion as 
we know it will perish or live. Our religion 
must prove itself efficient for sinners or ad- 
mit its total inefficiency, for it has only con- 
fessed or unconfessed sinners with whom 
tp deal. 

Here is the line of the familiar argument 
for the impossibility of forgiveness. The 
moral order, like the natural order, is im- 
mutable and inviolable. If it were other- 
wise, we should have no moral order at all. 
To believe that the moral order can be vio- 
lated without disaster is to introduce moral 
chaos. Disaster must be as inevitable to the 
sinner as to him who breaks a natural law. 
The falling body will strike the ground. 
[62] 



SAVING FORGIVENESS 



The falling soul can expect only a similar 
destination. "The soul that sinneth, it 
must die." 

We cannot disprove this argument by the 
mere revolt of our souls against its hope- 
less conclusion. The common answer, which 
unfortunately is sometimes made in the very 
name of religion, that the inevitableness of 
sin's disaster cannot be true, because all men 
instinctively shrink from its truth, is simply 
puerile prattle. Men also shrink from the 
truth of the inevitableness of nature. When 
it is the body of an innocent child who by 
the misstep of ignorance is dashed to the 
ground, who of us does not revolt at heart 
from the seemingly harsh inexorableness of 
nature's law? But in spite of our revolt, 
nature goes serenely on its determined way. 
Because we do not any of us really want 
to die in sin is no vahd argument against 
the inevitableness of that death. 

We can reasonably refute an argument 
which is solidly based upon fact only by the 
interposition of other solid facts. Believ- 
ing as we must in the inviolability of the 
[63] 



EFFICIENT KELIGION 



moral order, we cannot reasonably believe in 
the possibility of forgiveness unless we can 
show that forgiveness is not a contradiction 
of that order, but indeed a very part of it. 

This must be the line of our argument of 
refutation. The moral order is immutable 
and inviolable. But what is the moral or- 
der? Is the moral order malevolent or be- 
nevolent? Is it the product of unintelli- 
gent and heartless force, or the expression of 
a thoughtful and loving will? 

When we seek a reply to this fair question, 
we note that even the natural order is not 
relentlessly malevolent. A close scrutiny 
of nature reveals the presence everywhere 
of healing, remedial agencies. The man 
who breaks a law of nature does not in- 
evitably perish. If his violation of nature's 
law makes him sick, there are remedies in na- 
ture and power in the God of nature to cure 
him of his sickness. If his body is wounded 
by his violation of law, coagulation will stop 
the flow of the blood from the wound, and 
by nature's healing process the new skin 
will be formed. 

[64] 



SAVING FORGIVENESS 



By analogy we should expect to find, not 
outside of the moral order, but within that 
order itself, some provision for the cure of 
the sinful soul. And when we see every 
day men, now happy in the assurance of sins 
forgiven, who were once miserable in unf or- 
given sin, we ought reasonably to regard this 
spectacle just as we regard the spectacle of 
the healthy man who was once sick in body. 
We ought to regard it as evidence, not that 
the moral order itself has been abrogated, 
but that the benevolence of the moral order 
has been vindicated. Instead of the asser- 
tion that because of the immutability of the 
moral order no sin can be forgiven, we must 
assert that because of the immutability of the 
benevolence of that order sin can be for- 
given. Over against the sombre words of 
the decree of immutable law, "The soul that 
sinneth, it must die," we then are permitted 
to read the glowing words of the decree of 
an equally immutable love, "If we confess 
our sins. He is faithful and just to forgive 
us our sins." The moral order, like the 
natural order, is the expression of the will 
[65] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



of God, and everywhere we read the truth 
that God is love. 

But while we find the place for the for- 
giveness of sin in the changeless moral order 
and not outside it, we must note that there 
is a prevalent idea of forgiveness which is 
wholly untenable. It is the idea that for- 
giveness means only the remission of the de- 
served punishment of sin. 

Such an idea is unreasonable from the 
very argument which makes forgiveness 
credible. Forgiveness is credible, as has just 
been indicated, only on the basis of the im- 
mutability of the benevolence of the moral 
order. To remit the punishment of sin 
would be as destructive to the idea of be- 
nevolence as to the corresponding idea of 
immutability. If sin did not always end in 
punishment, the educational force of the 
moral order would be altogether wanting, 
and there really can be no conceivable be- 
nevolence which is not educational. Fire 
burns ; it always burns ; it always must burn ; 
not only because nature is changeless, but 
also because nature is benevolent. There 
[66] 



SAVING FORGIVENESS 



is no other way for a benevolent nature to 
teach men to keep away from the fire except 
by the way of the inevitableness of the con- 
sequence of fire. When men expect God to 
take away from them all the natural and in- 
evitable consequences of their wrong doing, 
they are really expecting Him to act con- 
trary to His nature of love. This, indeed, 
would be the introduction into the world of 
God of moral chaos. 

But this is not the kind of forgiveness 
which the children of God need. This con- 
ception of forgiveness is as unhelpful to 
men as it is unreasonable. No idea has done 
more harm to the religion of Jesus than this. 
Embracing this false idea, men have called 
themselves Christians only because of their 
fear of punishment. They have minimized 
the value of Christ's love and sacrifice, "ac- 
cepting Him" only as the scapegoat upon 
whom their own sins have been im justly 
visited; and they have settled down into a 
life of ease and content, sometimes to a life 
of continued sin, indulging the enervating 
delusion that the "blood of Jesus" has paid 

[67] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



their ransom price, emancipating them only 
from the punishment of sin. 

This conception of the forgiveness of sin 
had its logical development in the sale of in- 
dulgence to sin. And though "indulgences" 
are no longer openly purchased, the debili- 
tating influence of the idea is still present 
in the lives of those who cling to their dar- 
ling sins in the hope that by and by, perhaps 
by means of a hasty deathbed confession, 
they may find immunity from deserved pun- 
ishment through reliance upon the sacrifice 
of Christ. The forgiveness promised by 
the religion of Jesus will not become a real 
saving power in men's lives until this false 
and emasculating idea is completely aban- 
doned. 

Forgiveness is an act which requires the 
voluntary co-operation of two persons. 
There must be both the person who grants 
and the person who takes. He who has 
been wronged, must be willing to bestow 
mercy; he who has done the wrong, must 
be willing to receive the mercy. It does not 
follow, therefore, that all sins must be for- 
[68] 



SAVING FORGIVENESS 



given because God has revealed to men His 
invariable mercy. Before the forgiveness 
promised in God's love becomes actual, there 
must be added to the willingness of God a 
willingness in men. 

The man who does not confess his sins, 
truly repent of them, and heartily determine 
to turn away from them, cannot reasonably 
expect forgiveness, not because these things 
are arbitrary conditions to God's offer, but 
simply because they are the only adequate 
expression of the man's willingness to re- 
ceive. Confession avails for the sinful soul 
what the recital of symptoms avails for the 
diseased body. It is the acknowledgment 
of the inharmonious condition. Repentance 
avails to the sinner as a trustful submission 
to the physician avails to the sick. It is in 
reality the disavowal of the inharmonious 
conditions. The determination to turn away 
from sin avails as does the acceptance of 
the physician's prescription and the obedi- 
ence to the physician's orders. It is the 
attempt to co-operate with the healing and 
restoring agencies. 

[69] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



Without this co-operation of sinful men 
with the loving God, in spite of the immuta- 
ble benevolence of the moral order, which 
is only another way of saying, in spite of 
the eternal willingness of God, the sin will 
remain unf orgiven. 

We are ready now for a definition of for- 
giveness. Forgiveness is the restoration of 
the sinner into the redemptive, strengthen- 
ing love of God. It is accomplished by the 
volimtary co-operation of man with God. 
Through physical suffering and through 
mental anguish, through sorrow for the ir- 
remediable wrong done to one's self and to 
others, some of the inevitable punishment of 
sin must persist ; but through the confession 
and true repentance of the sinner, through 
his willingness and determination to come 
back into harmony with the moral order 
which has been violated, God's eternal will- 
ingness to grant forgiveness is made opera- 
tive and the harmony is restored. The res- 
toration of the harmony through confession 
and true repentance is as inevitable in the 
law of God's love as the unpleasant con- 

[70] 



SAVING FORGIVENESS 



sequences of sin are inevitable by the same 
law. 

Forgiveness, thus defined, must be con- 
sidered not as a mere possibility. When 
the necessary conditions are fulfilled, it be- 
comes an unavoidable certainty. The truth 
which Jesus taught and hved of the Fatherly 
care of God, makes it possible for no man 
to believe other than that his truly repented 
sin must be forgiven. The "unforgivable 
sin," sometimes called the sin against the 
Holy Ghost, must be considered only as the 
sin of continued impenitence. Whenever 
any man, however far he may have wan- 
dered, "comes to himself" and comes back 
to his Father of love, he will always find 
the Father waiting to restore to him his lost 
sonship. Whenever, like the prodigal son 
in the parable, he is ready to say, "Father, 
I have sinned, but I want to come back 
home, and I want to be more worthy," then 
the kiss of forgiveness will be immediate 
and the restoration will be complete. 

By whatever motive the sinner may be in- 
duced to come back into harmony with the 

[ 71 ] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



Father's love matters little. The prodigal 
of the parable seemingly "came to himself" 
just because his body became weary of the 
unsatisfying husks. Perhaps his motive 
was the lowest of all. It may be that the 
highest motive is the soul's dissatisfaction 
with the uselessness of the life of sin, due to 
the soul's awakening to the virile desire to 
be of some use in the world. But whatever 
the motive, only let the prodigal go to the 
Father in penitence, and the Father will 
forgive, aye, must forgive, for the Father's 
very nature is changeless love. 

It is true, too, that the restoration will be 
complete by whatever road the penitent sin- 
ner may return. He may accept some phil- 
osophical statement of the truth of Christ's 
sacrifice for him. Or, without any definite 
knowledge of the philosophy or of the the- 
ology of Christ's religion, he may come di- 
rectly to the Father Himself, led by the hand 
of some human friend who loves him. Or 
he may come back to the Father, guided 
thereto by the echo in his heart of some 
single word of hope and of encouragement. 
[72] 



SAVING FORGIVENESS 



There are many ways to the heart of the 
Father's love, and no single interpretation 
of Christ's religion can justly claim a mo- 
nopoly of those ways. The mercy of God's 
forgiveness is ready for all those who come 
by any of the different ways, provided only 
that they come in penitence, willing to re- 
ceive the forgiveness which God is ever will- 
ing to bestow. 

And this is what the forgiveness will al- 
ways accomplish in any man's life. It will 
give him new efficiency for helpful service 
in the world. One could wish that Jesus 
had carried the story of the prodigal a little 
farther. We should like to know what hap- 
pened to that wayward son after his restora- 
tion to his father's home. Was he never 
again tempted to go away into new scenes of 
prodigality? But we are left to answer 
this interesting query only by reference to 
our own experiences and to the experiences 
of our friends and acquaintances. From 
what we know of ourselves and from what 
we observe in others, we cannot believe that 
the father's ready forgiveness completely 
[73] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



eradicated from the son's heart all sinful 
tendencies. Forgiveness is not the end of 
salvation, which in its essence is the develop- 
ment of noble and serviceable character. It 
is just the beginning of salvation. After 
the forgiveness there may come new tempta- 
tions. But the restoration to the lost son- 
ship in the Father's love gives new powers 
of resistance. The practical value of it all 
to any man is just this new power of re- 
sistance and this new power of helpfulness. 
It is the reawakening of the heart of the 
sinner to consciousness of his obligations, 
his privileges, and his powers as the son of 
God. It is the restoration of his sonship. 
The forgiveness that will save us is the 
assured forgiveness of the Father's love co- 
operating with our willingness, enabling us 
to live not merely in the hope of future bliss 
in His mercy, but in the practice of a present 
usefulness in His service. 



[74] 



ABUNDANT HEALTH 



CHAPTER FIVE 



" He called the twelve together and gave them power and 
authority over all devils, and to cure diseases. And he sent 
them forth . . . to heal the sick." — Luke 9: 1,2. 



ABUNDANT HEALTH 

It is narrated in the Gospels that the im- 
prisoned John the Baptist, in a moment of 
doubt, sent two disciples to Jesus who asked 
Him this direct question, "Art Thou He that 
should come, or do we look for another?" 
Jesus did not meet the question with a dog- 
matic assertion, nor with a metaphysical ar- 
gument. His answer was couched in the 
form of a visible demonstration. "In that 
same hour," the narrative of Luke states, 
"He cured many of diseases and plagues and 
evil spirits ; and on many that were blind He 
bestowed sight." After He had performed 
this helpful ministry to men's suffering 
bodies. He turned to the emissaries of the 
doubting Forerunner and said to them, "Go, 
tell John what things ye have seen." 

As we proceed with the biograpHy of 
Jesus, we discover that not only did He 
Himself claim to demonstrate God's power 
by healing the sick, but He bade His dis- 
ciples to do likewise. The inference from 

[77] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



this extension of the heahng ministry is quite 
plain. Jesus did not beheve that the power 
to cure the sick was a pecuHar power resi- 
dent only in Himself, but that it was a 
power imiversally practicable by all who 
should follow His example and become im- 
bued with His spirit. 

The history of the development of Christ's 
religion, however, reveals the fact that all 
of the followers of Jesus apparently have 
not accepted His view of the inevitable 
relation between God's power and men's 
bodies. The professed Christians of the 
first century, it is true, are reported to have 
cured diseases, but the twentieth century 
Christians are accustomed to denominate 
such powers as "miracles," more or less in- 
credible and altogether inexplicable. Some 
of the "saints" of the Middle Ages are also 
said to have performed "miraculous" cures; 
and the twentieth century is wont to look 
upon these reports only as the evidence of 
the credulity and superstition of an unsci- 
entific age. So far have we of the pres- 
ent day divorced ourselves in this particu- 
[78] 



ABUNDANT HEALTH 



lar from Christ's teaching and practice, that 
when a certain sect of Christians now claims 
to demonstrate God's power by healing 
men's bodies, the great majority of Christ's 
professed followers are moved either to jeers 
or to bitter denunciation. 

What is the reason for this departure 
from the practice and the evident thought 
of Jesus? Here are the commonly offered 
explanations. 

Christ cured diseases, it is said, not be- 
cause such cures were an essential part of 
His ministry, but only because in the age 
which looked for signs and wonders these 
miracles were the only way by which He 
could attract men's attention and win their 
confidence. This explanation makes the 
Christian care for the bodies of men only 
an incidental and temporary manifestation 
of God's power, a first century means to an 
end, the end, of course, being the manifesta- 
tion of God's forgiving love applied to 
men's souls. 

A second explanation of the cures of 
Christ and of His immediate disciples sug- 
[79] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



gests that this ministry to men's bodily 
needs was performed only because there was 
in Christ's time no adequate scientific treat- 
ment of diseases, and that cures in Christ's 
name are no longer possible because now 
they are unneeded. By the logic of this 
explanation, the science of medicine is con- 
ceived as having usurped this particular 
work of Jesus. Drugs and tonics have ab- 
rogated the power of His healing word and 
touch. 

There is truth in both of these explana- 
tions. Undoubtedly the spectacular and 
seemingly miraculous method by which 
Jesus performed His cures was both a de- 
mand and a product of the age in which He 
lived. It is also undoubtedly true that had 
Christ's age possessed our modern, God-in- 
spired equipments for the treatment of dis- 
eases, at least the manner of His cures would 
have been modified. 

But neither of these explanations is quite 
sufficient. The cures of Jesus were some- 
thing more than "miracles." They were 
benefactions. The significant element in 
[80] 



ABUNDANT HEALTH 



His healing ministry was not the incredible 
wonder, but the pitying love. And science 
never can abrogate the need of the healing 
ministry of love. It seems that Jesus loved 
the whole man — the soul which his body but 
dimly revealed, and the body which was the 
soul's medium of development and of ex- 
pression. The sick man, like the sinful 
man, was to Jesus out of harmony with 
God's plan, therefore he was to be pitied 
and saved. It was Christ's desire and at- 
tempt to make men "every whit whole." 

If the followers of Jesus have lost any 
part of that desire, they have lost a part of 
the Christ-like breadth of sympathy. If 
they have ceased to make the attempt to save 
any part of the man that needs salvation, 
they have ceased to perform a part of the 
Christ-like ministry. To the followers of 
Him who came to save the whole man to his 
best estate the sick must still arouse pity, 
and unless the religion of Jesus can help the 
sick in body, it will ever have hard work to 
prove that it can help the sick in soul. 

But when we admit that the twentieth 
[81] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



century disciples of Jesus should, like Christ 
Himself, demonstrate the power and the 
love of God by healing the sick, we must 
not limit these modern disciples to Christ's 
exact method of healing. We call Christ's 
cures miraculous because we do not quite 
understand the manner of their accomplish- 
ment, and we are prone to limit the use of 
the term "Christian healing" to similar, un- 
usual, and apparently inexplicable achieve- 
ments. Thus we say that a physician cures 
by science, but that a Christian must cure 
by "faith." We call the results of the 
ministry of the country doctor natural, and 
the results of the ministry of some "faith 
healer," or "Christian Scientist healer," su- 
pernatural. But, as a matter of fact, one 
kind of cure is no more wonderful than 
another. No cure is explicable except it 
be attributed to that unknown redemptive 
power which some people call nature and 
others God. 

In all cases of cure the necessary condi- 
tion and the contributory cause is an obedi- 
ent and reposeful trust. The healer, to 
[82] 



ABUNDANT HEALTH 



whatever school he may belong, who can 
command such trust, creates the condition 
under which the redemptive power of God, 
or nature, accomplishes the beneficent re- 
sult. And any philosophy or so-called 
"Christian Science," or religious belief which 
can induce this essential condition to health, 
has as much right to the claim of healing 
power as has any accredited physician the 
world has ever known. 

Right here is where the true religion of 
Jesus Christ makes its claim to the contin- 
ued power to minister to the bodies of men. 
The religion of Jesus, when rightly under- 
stood and truly appropriated into one's life, 
can and does induce this essential condition 
and cause of health. If a man has truly 
accepted Christ's religion, he believes that 
God is his Father, and that his Father doeth 
all things well. He practices obedience to 
his Father's will, as made known to him by 
the discovered laws of hygiene as well as 
by the revealed laws of love. He therefore 
lives, or at least the Christian should live, 
in obedient and reposeful trust. This 
[83] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



causal condition of health in himself he 
makes operative in the lives of others by the 
pov/er of his influence. 

It would, indeed, be a sad thing for the 
world if the health-producing confidence in 
God were the possession only of those who 
believe in the teachings of Mrs. Eddy, or of 
any other modern exponent of a single heal- 
ing cult. This health-producing confidence 
is the heritage of all who, through Christ's 
teachings, have come vitally to trust in the 
Father's love. And wherever, under the 
particular name of whatever sect or cult, 
that trust becomes a reality in the life, its 
influence upon the health of the body is 
inevitable. The religion of Jesus still makes 
and keeps men well, because that religion 
is based upon the Christ-taught confidence 
in God. 

This apparent generalization is not an 
evasion of the issue before us. At first 
thought it may seem that the Christian who 
is merely obedient and reposeful in his con- 
fidence in God falls very short of obedi- 
ence to Christ's specific command to His dis- 
[84] 



ABUNDANT HEALTH 



ciples to heal the sick. And the somewhat 
general health-giving atmosphere which such 
Christians create by their influence may 
seem very different from the specific cures 
which the earlier disciples performed, and 
which certain sects of modern disciples still 
perform. The apparent difference, how- 
ever, is due to the fact already noted, that 
we are wont to limit the operation of the 
Christian's healing power to the first century 
methods. But really in the Christian's heal- 
ing power as well as in Christ's power the 
significant element is not the miraculous 
method of the cure, but still just the bene- 
faction of love. It may be doubted whether 
the disciples were commanded to perform 
miracles when they were sent out to heal 
the sick. They were commanded only to 
help their fellow-men in their present needs. 
With unwarranted assumption we have 
called their obedience to that command mi- 
raculous, but we must remember that the 
obedience had been as real and as efficacious, 
even though we could explain all the details 
by which the cures were performed. 
[85] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



It is quite possible that the science of 
psychology, in its relation to therapeutics, 
may sometimes reduce the cures of Jesus and 
of His disciples to natural effects from nat- 
ural causes. Indeed, the only way we can 
reasonably beheve in the cures which to us 
now seem miraculous, is to believe that the 
miraculous element is present only because 
we do not know enough of the operation of 
spiritual laws to understand just how the 
cures were accomplished. But if the happy 
day comes when the "miracle" shall be ex- 
plained away, the cure itself will have lost 
none of its wonder as the evidence of the 
power of God's pitying, saving love. 

And so if we say concerning the modern 
power of Christ's religion to cure that the 
power is becoming, in some degree, expli- 
cable by the modern understanding of psy- 
chologic conditions, we do not detract one 
whit from the truth that it is still God's 
power of pitying, saving love that performs 
the cure. When we say that real confidence 
in God will produce the conditions of obedi- 
ence and repose essential to health, and that 
[86] 



ABUNDANT HEALTH 



such obedience and repose must have their 
inevitable influence upon the health of 
others, we may be talking in the language 
of modern psychology, but we are none the 
less talking also the language of the heal- 
ing power of God. 

We cannot reasonably discredit in toto 
the claims of the modern "faith healer" and 
the "Christian Scientist" any more than we 
can discredit the cures of Jesus and of His 
early disciples. For what evidence have we 
that God is limited as to the method of the 
operation of His heahng power? But, on 
the other hand, we must not limit Christ's 
heahng to any of these particular ways in 
which cures have been or may be accom- 
plished. In so far as these methods result 
in good, in so far are they evidence, not that 
God's power works in any one exclusive 
method, but that many methods may accom- 
phsh the necessary condition of health. 

Mrs. Eddy, evidently upon the founda- 
tion of other thinkers who had preceded 
her, built up a system of philosophy which 
she called a science. She said that God was 
[87] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



all and that God was good, and that there- 
fore nothing that was not good could exist. 
Disease and sin to her were unreal, the 
"errors" of "mortal mind." To demonstrate 
the truth of this philosophy she claimed the 
power to make sick people well. "Here is 
a man who once believed he was ill; now he 
believes he is well. Therefore, the truth of 
my assertions of the nothingness of dis- 
ease and of the allness of God has been vin- 
dicated." That was her argument. But 
really Mrs. Eddy not only claimed too much 
from her "demonstration;" there was a cer- 
tain sense in which she claimed too little. 

This man, who by the acceptance of her 
interpretation of religion has been brought 
into buoyant health, has not demonstrated 
the truth of Mrs. Eddy's philosophy, but he 
has done much more than that. He has 
demonstrated the energizing, health-giving 
power of a simple confidence in God. Once 
he lived in dread of the omnipresent germs 
of disease. Now he trusts the omnipresence 
of the divine love. Once he worried about 
his work and about his friends, about the 
[88] 



ABUNDANT HEALTH 



possible ill-effects of what happened yester- 
day, and the probable ill-effects of what he 
was afraid would happen to-morrow. Now 
he dwells securely in his trust in the God of 
love who is the same yesterday, to-day, and 
forever. Is it any wonder that his health 
has become energized? Is it in any degree 
remarkable that his physical powers have be- 
come strengthened? 

But he who has accepted any other of the 
many prevailing interpretations of Christ's 
rehgion can have the same health-giving 
trust in the changeless, omnipotent, and om- 
nipresent God of love. He ought to have 
it. He must have it, if his Christianity be 
real. And when he has that trust, what- 
ever may be his accepted creed or his de- 
nominational preference, he has all that the 
professed Christian Scientist has or can 
have. He has that which can and must en- 
ergize all his physical powers to the efficient 
performance of all his required physical 
labours; for he has that which dispels all 
disease-producing fear and worry, and that 
which promotes a health-producing obedi- 
,[89] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



ence to the laws of physical well-being. He 
has been made whole by the religion of 
Jesus, and if he lives in his confidence in 
God and inculcates a like confidence in 
others, he has helped to make them whole. 

It is confidence in God, then, and not con- 
fidence in any of the interpretations of re- 
ligion, which creates the abundant health. 

The truth of this assertion of the healing 
power of confidence in God is reasonably 
based upon the revealed truth of the Holy 
Word. It is re-enforced by the conception 
and practice of Jesus Himself. It is 
strengthened by the modern discoveries in 
psychological and religious therapeutics. 
But the truth of the assertion cannot be 
proven to any individual except by trial and 
success. It cannot be disproven except by 
trial and failure. Try it for yourselves. 
Live obediently, unafraid, and undisturbed 
in the confidence that God is love, and see 
what that confidence will do for you. Live 
in that confidence and see what, through its 
influence, you can do for others. 



[90] 



SUFFICIENT CONSOLATION 
CHAPTER SIX 



"I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another 
Comforter, that he may abide with you forever. . . . He shall 
teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance 
whatsoever I have said unto you." — John 14: 16, 26. 



SUFFICIENT CONSOLATION 

Apparently many people believe that the 
principal use of religion is to be found in 
its promised consolation. This mistaken 
notion is seemingly held not only by the mul- 
titudes who never think of embracing re- 
ligion at all except in time of sorrow, but 
also by many of the very exponents of re- 
ligion who are wont to present it, dressed, 
as it were, always in the garb of mourning. 
Thus preachers of the religion of Jesus have 
been known to tell the happy youths in their 
congregations that though they may not feel 
the need of religion now, when sorrows 
and troubles come, -when they get old and 
when they must think of death, then they 
will need religion for consolation and for 
help. It is, perhaps, only natural that these 
happy youths, thus instructed, should in- 
definitely postpone their acceptance of re- 
ligion, while for the present they continue 
serenely to amuse themselves as they please 
[93] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



SO long as the dreaded troubles are delayed. 
For why should funeral flowers be pur- 
chased while life is still vigorous ? 

Of course, this is an inadequate concep- 
tion of the value of religion, and doubtless 
it is not at all the conception held by those 
whose words and acts seem to imply it. Un- 
less the religion of Jesus has a universal ap- 
plication to all phases of human life — to 
life's joys as well as to its sorrows, to its 
youthful aspirations as well as to its ageful 
reminiscences — then we must consider that 
religion is at best only of temporary value 
to men, and we must admit that its tempo- 
rary value is due altogether to the continued 
presence in the world of the evils of sin and 
of sorrow and of death, which Jesus came 
to overcome. For, indeed, Jesus came into 
the world not merely to console those who 
were miserable, but to remove the misery 
that needed consolation. The greater part 
of His ministry was in vain if His religion 
is only a consolation for the sorrowful and 
the dying. 

But on the other hand, while we vehe- 
[94] 



SUFFICIENT CONSOLATION 



mently deny that the only or even the prin- 
cipal value of religion lies in its consolatory 
power, we must admit that unless the reli- 
gion of Jesus can and does console, it be- 
comes a failure just where its success is most 
needed. To those who have come to the 
extremities of life, the religion of Jesus 
must be able to furnish a sufficient consola- 
tion, or all the other promised blessings of 
that religion will become null and void. 

Consolation is only one of the helps of re- 
ligion. Like the life-preserver thrown to 
the man who has fallen overboard, it is a 
help immediately demanded by the exigen- 
cies of the situation. But if the help be 
denied to the struggling, perishing man in 
the deep waters, the Christian assurance of 
God's love and God's care will avail only 
as "sounding brass or a clanging cymbal." 

It may be true that there are some few 
souls who are never forced to struggle in 
the deep waters. Possibly there is now and 
then one who is born into kindly surroimd- 
ings, whose youth is carefully guarded, 
whose maturity is serene, and whose death 
[95] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



is peaceful and hopeful. If there be such 
an one, he is the type of what ought to be, 
and of what would be if all mankind should 
come into right relations with God and with 
life; of what will be, we can reasonably 
hope, when the religion of Jesus shall have 
reached the maturity of its influence in the 
inauguration of the millennial age of health 
and of joy, of trust and of love. 

But meanwhile these types of what ought 
to be, if they exist at all, are very excep- 
tional cases. As yet the millennial age has 
not dawned. Now most people who are 
normally alive are at some time or other 
engulfed in the dark waters of sorrow. It 
may be true in some instances that they have 
fallen into the water themselves. Their own 
ignorance, their carelessness, or their sinful- 
ness may have caused the fall. It some- 
times seems, however, that some one else has 
pushed a fellow-man into the water. In- 
deed, the weak and the incompetent are al- 
ways being thrown overboard by the strong 
and the capable, and one cannot readily see 
how, in this world of competition and in 
[96] 



SUFFICIENT CONSOLATION 



accord with the law of the "survival of the 
fittest," it can be otherwise. 

But sometimes it really seems as though 
God Himself had thrown men into the 
waters of affliction, which are far deeper 
than the height of their puny human intel- 
lects. It is true that under the head of "the 
mysterious Providence," we are all too prone 
to catalogue many sorrows which are 
brought upon us either by ourselves or by 
other human beings. But when we make 
all due allowances for this common tendency 
to blame God for what men themselves are 
responsible, there remains a considerable 
residue of human sorrow in which the human 
intellect is unable to trace the hand of man. 

Of all the "mysterious Providences," the 
most mysterious, perhaps, is the inevitable- 
ness, but withal the unexpectedness of death. 
As a general axiom, every man knows that 
everybody must die, but the normal man is 
never quite ready specifically to apply the 
axiom either to himself or to his own loved 
ones. It is always at an unexpected mo- 
ment that our dear ones are snatched from 
[ 97 ] , 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



the arms of our protecting love. And 
though we well know that the same fate 
awaits ourselves, the inevitable Angel is still 
the unexpected Angel when He comes to 
take us, too, away. Who is it who thrusts 
us beneath these overwhelming waters of be- 
reavement and of death? Who, unless it 
be the God whom we call the God of love, 
but whose ways we do not, cannot under- 
stand? 

Now if the basal proposition of the Chris- 
tian religion be true, that God is love, we 
must believe that whatever the cause of the 
sorrow, the cure of the sorrow is certain. 
If God Himself is responsible for the sor- 
row. He surely is a God of cruel caprice 
and not at all a God of love if in some way 
He does not make the harsh experience a 
means to a benevolent end. If the deep 
waters engulf the soul because of the 
thoughtlessness or selfishness of other men, 
we have reason to expect that the mere jus- 
tice of God, to say nothing of His mercy, 
would not permit the innocent to suffer in- 
consolably. If we find that the man has 
[98] 



SUFFICIENT CONSOLATION 



been plunged into the deep waters because 
of his own sinful neglect, even then we can- 
not believe that a God who is love could 
watch his dying struggles and offer no help. 
If God could conceivably excuse Himself 
from helping that strugghng man with the 
declaration that the suffering and sorrow 
are self-inflicted, God's compassion could 
conceivably become less than man's, for no 
real man can complacently suffer another 
to drown, however careless or sinful that 
other has been. 

We are not, then, forced to diagnose each 
case of sorrow before we can expect the 
application of the Christian remedy of con- 
solation. We cannot say that some sorrows 
are consolable and that others must be con- 
sidered as inconsolable. We must boldly 
declare that in the religion of Jesus there 
is consolation for all sorrow, whatever its 
cause, or we must logically admit the re- 
ligion of Jesus to be a pitiable failure. 

It is necessary here that we understand 
exactly what is meant by the term "conso- 
lation," for certain prevalent, mistaken ideas 
[99] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



of the nature of the consolation of rehgion 
have brought confusion to many and have 
plunged some into the darkness of cynical 
despair. 

There is, first of all, the mistaken idea of 
the Christian fatalist, who believes that con- 
solation may be found in an unreasoning 
and uncomplaining submission to God. 
"Though He slay me, yet will I trust in 
Him," replied Job to the friends who sought 
to comfort him in his distresses. And in 
spite of Christ's clear revelation of the God 
of love and compassion, there are many of 
the professed followers of Christ who at- 
tempt to find consolation in the religious 
fatalism of this semi-pagan. This is the 
black philosophy of fatalism tinged, but not 
beautified, with the color of religion. Con- 
sidered as consolation, it is cold and com- 
fortless. It assumes that God, in His un- 
knowableness, is an arbitrary, autocratic 
Sovereign, and that man is at best only the 
creature of God. 

At the opposite extreme of religious 
thought we find the mistaken idea that con- 
[100] 



SUFFICIENT CONSOLATION 



solation is to be obtained not in stoical sub- 
mission, but in insensible forgetfulness. 
"The sorrow that comes to us cannot be 
helped : therefore we will seek to forget it." 
Not all of the people who embrace this phi- 
losophy proceed to "eat, drink, and be 
merry." Perhaps the most of them just 
keep on attending to their daily business and 
performing their daily duties. When the 
sorrow which they cannot wholly overcome 
obtrudes itself upon their memories, they 
plunge all the harder into their absorbing 
labours. The people of this philosophy 
who have learned to call themselves Chris- 
tians, have found in Christianity no sub- 
stitute for the philosophy, but only a slight 
modification of its expression. These Chris- 
tian philosophers say: "Our hope is in toil — 
not merely for ourselves, but for others. 
We must seek the forgetfulness of our own 
sorrow in incessant, thought-absorbing serv- 
ice of others." 

To many Christians this appears to be 
the very ideal for the sorrowing soul to 
pursue. Indeed, there is an element of true 
[101] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



and Christlike greatness in this attempt to 
assuage grief by a self- forgetful service 
of others. Nor can anyone who has not 
tried it deny the efficacy of this method of 
the treatment of sorrow. 

The contention is here made, however, 
that the surcease of sorrow, which may be 
induced by the way of forget fulness, is not 
really consolation at all. The man who 
takes to drink may find surcease of sorrow 
in the exhilaration or the stupefaction of 
his indulgence. And what more does he 
obtain who seeks relief in incessant toil, aye, 
even in unselfish toil for others? 

This proposed remedy is at best a sorry 
makeshift. It is like the prescription of 
a drug to heal a painful wound. The 
drug may cause the pain of the wound to 
cease, but it unfortunately does not help 
to heal the wound itself. If the drug- 
produced insensibility be continued long 
enough, of course, the wound may become 
healed by nature. And some people, carry- 
ing out the analogy, have hoped, by work 
and service, to continue their insensibility 

[102] 



SUFFICIENT CONSOLATION 



to sorrow until Time shall have had 
opportunity to heal the wounded heart. 
But is Time the only healer which the Chris- 
tian religion has to offer to the distressed 
and suffering soul? Is there no balm in 
Gilead that can soothe the pain of the wound 
by healing the wound itself? Must we al- 
ways and only try to forget? But really 
we know it is impossible to forget. It is 
not only our minds that will not permit the 
f orgetf ulness ; our hearts forbid it. Our 
yearning love craves the boon of memory 
and will brook no denial of the boon, even 
though the memory be accompanied by bitter 
anguish. 

We are brought by these considerations 
to this statement of the truth. No consola- 
tion can suffice the reasoning mind and the 
loving heart of man which demands even 
the temporary disuse of any of his God- 
created faculties. The sufficient consola- 
tion must be that which satisfies both his 
mind and his heart. It must bring comfort 
not by the denial of his reason, but through 
his reason. It must soothe not by the ob- 

[ 103 ] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



liter ation of his memory, but by the very 
use of his memory. 

The offer of consolation through reason 
and through memory is the oif er contained 
in Christ's promise of the "Comforter." 
The "Comforter" was to be the Teacher. 
This is the consolation offered to sorrowing 
men available through their reason. And 
the "Comforter" was to "bring to remem- 
brance all things," whatsoever He had said 
unto them. This is the consolation offered 
to sorrowing men available through their 
memory. 

A great deal of valuable time has been 
wasted by theologians in their discussion of 
the nature and of the office of this "Com- 
forter." But stripped of all its theological 
terminology and of its mystical significance, 
Christ's offer to sorrowing men is simply the 
offer to them of the continuance in sorrow 
of a reasonable faith and of a dauntless 
trust. 

Some of the specific things which Jesus 
had said to His disciples and of which the 
promised "Comforter" was to remind them 
[104] 



SUFFICIENT CONSOLATION 



were these. He had told them that God 
cared even for the sparrows, and that they 
were of more worth in God's sight than 
many sparrows. He had told them that the 
Father was more willing to give them bless- 
ings than they were willing to ask. He 
had declared that it was not the will of the 
Father that anyone should perish. But 
also He had told them that in this world 
they should have tribulation. By His own 
example, more forcibly than He could pos- 
sibly have shown them by mere words. He 
had made it quite clear to them that love in 
a sinful world must suiFer, and that obedi- 
ence to the vnll of the loving God is not al- 
ways easy. 

But some of these things, perhaps all of 
these things, Jesus evidently thought His 
disciples might forget unless they had a re- 
minder. Let us repeat. The "Comforter" 
is the divine reminder to men of the truths 
spoken and lived by Jesus, the basal truths 
of faith and of trust. 

In the dark it is not always easy to 
remember the truths which have been 
,[ 105 1 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



learned in the light. When a human 
father has proven his love for his child 
by many blessings of which the child is 
conscious, there may come a time when the 
blessing is hidden from the child's under- 
standing. The way, then, is dark to the 
child. The loving face of the father is 
temporarily hidden. But in the natural 
fear of his loneliness let the child hear the 
voice of his father. It will be the voice of 
reassurance coming to him in the darkness. 
It will be the tender reminder of the father's 
proven love. It will be the sweet assurance 
that that love cannot fail. 

This is the "Comforter" promised by 
Jesus to sorrowing souls. The "Comforter" 
is the voice of God speaking to men in the 
dark, bidding them to remember His unfail- 
ing goodness in the past, and reasonably to 
trust Him now that they cannot see. 

How different this consolation promised 
by Jesus from the consolation of the per- 
secuted servant of Jehovah in the poem of 
Job! Job said, "Though He slay me, yet 
will I trust in Him." The consoled Chris- 

[ 106 ] 



SUFFICIENT CONSOLATION 



tian says, "Because He loves me I know He 
cannot slay me." "I know in whom I have 
believed, and am persuaded that He is able 
to keep that which I have committed unto 
Him." 

And how different this consolation from 
the hoped-for consolation of absorption in 
self-indulgence or even in work and in serv- 
ice ! The man who tries to deaden his sensi- 
bility to suffering says, "I must forget." 
The Christian consoled by the divine re- 
minder of God's love says, "I need not try 
to forget, for I can trust." He who tries 
to deaden his sorrow by forgetfulness, al- 
ways becomes doubly bereaved. He is be- 
reaved not only in the present, but he is 
bereaved of the sweetness of the past. But 
he who has found consolation in a reasonable 
trust, finds the sweet and painful memories 
themselves added inducements to that trust. 
How can the remembered, precious moments 
of soul communion eternally cease? How, 
if God is love? The answer is this. Be- 
cause God is love, the precious experiences 
cannot cease, the soul communion cannot 
[107] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



stop. The continuance of the memory of 
the past is, after all, the promise of the 
fruitfulness of the hope for the future. 
He who has blest us cannot really discon- 
tinue His blessings, for He is changeless 
love. So though for a moment the way may 
be dark, reminded by the "Comforter," in 
reason and in sweet memory we can still 
trust and hope. 

" I know not where His islands lift 
Their fronded palms in air, 
I only know I cannot drift 
Beyond His love and care." 



[108] 



SUSTAINING STRENGTH 



CHAPTER SEVEN 



"My grace is sufficient for thee; for my strength is made 
perfect in weakness." — 2 Corinthians 12: 9. 



SUSTAINING STRENGTH 

When "Christian" in Bunyan's inunortal 
allegory started from the City of Destruc- 
tion, he bore upon his back a heavy burden. 
At first the purpose of the pilgrim's flight 
was but to rid himself of the burden which 
no man in his own city could loosen. The 
burden remained, however, until, on his way 
to Mount Zion, he came to the cross and the 
tomb. There, at the foot of the cross, the 
burden loosed itself. It rolled into the 
tomb and was seen no more. 

But by this time the purpose of "Chris- 
tian's" journey had become more clearly de- 
fined. The removal of the burden proved 
to be, after all, not an end in itself, but 
only a means to an end. It made the pil- 
grim free not to lie down and rest, but to 
run forward with increased buoyancy to- 
ward the Celestial City. 

There are many burdens incident to the 
busy life of this twentieth century of which 
John Bunyan made no account. The bur- 

[111] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



dens upon the backs of the Christians, in 
this age of competition and of conflict, are 
social in their nature as well as personal. 
They exist not only because every man is 
responsible to God, but also because every 
man is a part of the social order, and be- 
cause no man, in justice to his friends, his 
neighbours, his country, and his God, can 
escape from the City of Destruction just to 
save his own soul. He must live in the city 
wherein he was born. He must dwell amid 
the earthly conditions that surround him, 
and so long as he remains upon the earth 
an earthly burden must be bound upon his 
back. 

But surely this burden with its included 
social significance can be of no less concern 
to the God of love than "Christian's" bur- 
den of the weight only of his own sins. 
Somewhere on the hard road of ministry 
that leads to the Mount Zion of the earthly 
Kingdom of God, somewhere there must 
still be the place of the cross and the tomb 
where the burden shall be lightened. 

But where shall the modern Christian find 
[112] 



SUSTAINING STRENGTH 



relief from his burden ? Obviously, our an- 
swer to this question must depend upon our 
conception of the nature of the desired re- 
lief. 

There are two ways by which the oppres- 
siveness of any burden may be lightened. 
There is the method of subtraction, the de- 
crease of the load itself; and there is the 
method of addition, the increase of the 
strength to bear the load. 

When the former method has been ex- 
clusively pursued by Christians in the at- 
tempt only to decrease the weight of the bur- 
den, it has always ended disastrously. The 
result of this method is weakness and inef- 
ficiency. If a child is relieved of all re- 
sponsibility by his over-indulgent parents, 
the child will never, in any real sense of the 
word, become mature. If he is never 
compelled to fight his own battles against 
temptation, if he is never obliged to make 
a choice for himself, if he never knows dis- 
appointment and grief, and if he is never 
urged to make the sacrifice of unselfishness, 
this child indeed finds relief from some of 
[ 113 ] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



the burdens of life, but the cost of the rehef 
by this process of subtraction is the very 
usefulness of his life. 

Thus it is only at the cost of their useful- 
ness that men in religion seek to rid them- 
selves of the burdens of conflicts and of 
choices and of sacrifices. That period of 
Christian history which was dominated by 
Christians' refusal to bear the burdens of a 
social life with their fellow-men, was a 
period of personal piety at the expense of 
social helpfulness. If all Christians, like 
the monks of the Middle Ages, had sought 
relief from social burdens by the selfish proc- 
ess of their entrance into monasteries, no 
Christian would have grown to maturity of 
influence and of efficiency, and the world 
outside the monasteries would constantly 
have sunk lower into the depths of licen- 
tiousness and cruelty. 

Let the selfish Christian who seeks only 
to be rid of his burden be clearly described. 
He is the one who seeks relief from the ob- 
ligations of his God-created personality. 
He may seek the relief from God Himself. 
[114] 



SUSTAINING STRENGTH 



Perhaps instead of depending upon his own 
volition he may expect God, by a special 
revelation, to relieve him of the necessity 
of choice. It may be that instead' of 
developing his own power of resistance 
to evil he may expect a miracle of God 
to furnish him with the requisite power to 
resist in time of need. It is possible that 
without the trouble and anxiety and the 
sacrifice of his own love he may expect God 
to guide and to guard his relatives and his 
friends. It is even conceivable that he may 
be like the "Christian" of Bunyan's imag- 
ination, so intensely interested in the salva- 
tion of his own soul that he may expect God 
to save everybody else without his heart- 
burdened assistance. This is the man who 
"casts his burdens upon the Lord" with 
startling literalness. The inevitable effect 
of such an unwarranted, literal interpreta- 
tion of the Scriptural command is his dis- 
obedience to that other command, "Let every 
man bear his own burden." And the dis- 
obedience creates inefficiency and destroys 
personality. 

[115] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



Or this selfish Christian who seeks only 
to be rid of his burden of personal and 
social obligations may be he who tries to 
find relief from his fellow-men. Some 
people, for instance, are prone to throw the 
burden of their own sins upon their an- 
cestors. They have inherited weaknesses 
which, they think, relieve them of the bur- 
den of personal blameworthiness. Or it 
may be the conditions of society are held re- 
sponsible for their wrongdoing. Environ- 
ment has made them bad. Many people, 
too, are wont to throw the burden of their 
responsibility for others upon the teacher 
who trains their children, upon the Church 
that is supposed to care for the spiritual 
concerns of their neighbours, upon the 
preacher, the social reformer, and the phi- 
lanthropist. *'It is the business of other 
men to promote the welfare of my family 
and my community," these declare. "I pay 
others for this work. It is my business only 
to take care of myself." 

It is sad to admit that even professing 
Christians are guilty of this attempted eva- 
[116] 



SUSTAINING STRENGTH 



sion of the burden, both of personal and 
of social responsibility. "They have their 
reward." There are some of the burdens of 
a sensitive conscience and of a grieved love 
which these do not bear. But for this im- 
munity they pay the tremendous price of a 
hardened conscience and of a calloused heart. 
They are rid of the burden only at the ex- 
pense of their very manhood and woman- 
hood. And upon all of these who attempt 
to get rid of the burden of responsibility 
there falls always the heavier and more op- 
pressive burden of inefficiency. 

The fact is that in life as we know it there 
are some burdens that are absolutely neces- 
sary. All of these necessary and irremov- 
able burdens are reducible to one general 
class. They are the burdens of love. Per- 
haps a complete enumeration of the love- 
burdens would be impossible. A few sug- 
gestions, however, will suffice for their rec- 
ognition. 

The burden of right living is a love-bur- 
den. In this world all the children of God 
are burdened with the responsibility for pu- 

[117] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



rity and righteousness, both of thought and 
of conduct, not because they are in this 
world to save themselves for another, but be- 
cause here they must order their own lives in 
the way that shall best help those whom they 
love. 

The burden of sorrow for wrongdoing is 
a love-burden, for wrongdoing is an eva- 
sion of one of the responsibilities of love. 
It cannot be possible for the burden of the 
sorrow for sin to be wholly removed so long 
as the sinner is blessed by God with the 
power of memory and with the more divine 
power of love. It would not be well if the 
burden could be removed. The cross and 
the tomb of Christ mean to the Christian 
not the place where the sorrow of the sin is 
rolled away, but where the strength to bear 
even this burden is imparted by the merciful 
forgiveness of God. 

The burden of the service of others is an 
irremovable love-burden. And this burden 
includes all the lesser burdens of grief and 
of sympathy, of disappointment and of 
patience. For the wrongs of those we love 
[118] 



SUSTAINING STRENGTH 



we must always grieve. In their sorrows 
we, too, must sorrow. Because of their 
failures, we also must be disappointed. 
With their willfulness we must be patient. 
It is true for the Christian as well as for 
Christ Himself that there is the cup of love's 
sacrifice which cannot pass away, and so for 
the love-burdened Christian there always 
will be the agony of Gethsemane and the 
sacrifice of Calvary. 

But there are many burdens which are 
absolutely unnecessary. These unnecessary 
burdens may all be included under the gen- 
eral head of burdens of fear. 

The burden of the distrust of God's for- 
giveness is an unnecessary fear-burden. 
Though the sinful man of God-endowed 
conscience cannot reasonably hope or really 
wish to be relieved of the burden of the sor- 
row for sin, he can and should be relieved 
of the burden of the fear of sin's conse- 
quence. The former burden can be borne 
by him who is strengthened by God ; the lat- 
ter can be removed from him who really 
trusts in God. 

[119] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



Worry of any kind is an unnecessary fear- 
burden. Worry is the over-anxiety created 
by distrust. It is begotten of the fear of 
what is going to happen to-morrow either 
to ourselves or to others. This burden men 
bind upon their own backs, and the weight 
of this removable and self-inflicted burden 
is bearing many of the professed followers 
of the trustful Jesus to the very ground. 

Here in connection with these removable 
burdens is where we must interpret literally 
the command to cast our burdens upon the 
Lord. The command means not that we 
are to throw away our self-reliance, but just 
to throw away our fear. We can be rid 
of all of the self-inflicted fear-burdens by 
the way of trust. 

From the preceding resume of the diff*er- 
ent kinds of burdens we deduce this general 
statement of the burdened condition of all 
of God's children. They all must bear the 
God-entrusted burdens of love ; none need to 
bear the added self-inflicted burdens of fear. 
The strength that can sustain the burdened 
children of God is the strength that sup- 
[120] 



SUSTAINING STRENGTH 



ports the love and destroys the fear. 
Greater love and less fear, these are what 
we all need. 

The supply of these needs of all men is 
promised in the religion of Jesus Christ. In 
the words of the Apostle Paul to the Church 
at Corinth, the twofold assurance of the 
Christian religion is concisely stated. "My 
grace is sufficient for you, for My strength 
is made perfect in weakness." Sufficient 
grace! Divine strength! 

His grace is sufficient. The religion of 
Jesus brings us into filial relations with the 
Father who is gracious. The complete 
idea of God's graciousness includes not only 
His mercy and His forgiveness, but His 
care and His protection. Ever ready is He 
to forgive our repented sins, and ever watch- 
ful is He over our best interests and the 
interests of our friends and loved ones. If 
we really trust the love of our Father, all our 
fear-burdens will roll away. At the foot 
of the cross of Christ's sacrifice, if the cross 
means to us all that it should, our trust in the 
Father who so loves us will take away all 
[121] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



those burdens which we needlessly pile upon 
ourselves. His grace is sufficient. 

And His strength perfects our weakness. 
The appeal of Christ's cross is not only an 
appeal to trust, but an appeal to love. As 
He has loved us, so we are to love one 
another. In fellowship with the spirit of 
His love, the love-burdens will not grow less, 
but we shall grow stronger. It is only when 
our love falters that these burdens seem un- 
bearable. When we take His yoke upon 
us and learn of Him, we become united with 
the strength that enables us to bear. His 
strength makes perfect our weakness. 

But after all, the end of our pilgrimage 
through life is neither the removal nor the 
lightening of our burdens. When at the 
place of the cross, where our trust is re- 
newed and our strength increased, we see 
so many of the burdens roll away, and find 
those remaining so much easier to be borne, 
then we are to remember that the lessening 
of the load is but to increase the buoyancy 
of our onward journey in the path of serv- 
ice. We have come to interpret the Celes- 
[122] 



SUSTAINING STRENGTH 



tial City as the Kingdom of God upon the 
earth. We seek, it may be, not so much the 
heavenly city of bliss as the earthly city of 
righteousness and of justice and of brotherly 
love. The way we travel is not the way of 
mere personal salvation so much as the way 
of social service. But this way, too, has its 
Slough of Despond, its Hill Difficulty, its 
menacing ApoUyon, and its threatening 
lions by the way. We crave not the 
ease from our burdens which will enable 
us to rest in idleness, but that buoyant 
strength and that lightness of burden which 
shall enable us to press onward, conquering 
and to conquer, serving and to serve. 

The grace and the strength offered in the 
religion of Jesus will not be sufficient ex- 
cept for those who are determined to use 
that grace and strength in the continued 
service of their fellow-men and of God. 
The place of the cross and the tomb of 
Christ must be to us all the place of re- 
newed consecration. 



[123] 



SATISFYING JOY 



CHAPTER EIGHT 



'Your joy no one taketh away from you." — John 16: 22. 



SATISFYING JOY 

The right of all men to the pursuit of hap- 
piness was not granted by the Constitution 
of the United States. It is a right granted to 
them by their divine birthright. All that 
constitutions and laws can do is to seek to 
protect the right. Exactly as all men in 
God's world have the right to eat and to 
sleep, so they have the right to be happy, 
and for much the same reason. They have 
the right to eat and to sleep because their 
physical natiu-es demand sustenance and 
refreshment. They have the right to be 
happy because their spiritual natures de- 
mand sustenance and refreshment. The 
appetite for happiness is as normal a char- 
acteristic of the human being as the appetite 
for food, and both appetites are God- 
created. 

But it IS the tritest of all trite truths that 
the appetite for happiness is not universally 
satisfied. There are many of God's children 
[ 127 ] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



who experience very little of the fullness of 
joy; perhaps there are some who know noth- 
ing at all of such fullness ; probably there is 
no one who has ever been completely filled. 
Here is one of the many apparent contradic- 
tions between what should be and what is. 
According to the plan of the Creator, re- 
vealed in men's inherent appetite for happi- 
ness, all men should be happy. Because of 
existing conditions, both within themselves 
and without themselves, they all fail in the 
attainment of that right. 

So prevalent, indeed, is the unhappiness, 
and so inevitable does the unhappiness seem 
that some pagan thinkers have found the 
chief end in life to lie not merely in the sub- 
jugation of all desires, but in the very anni- 
hilation of them. While even some Chris- 
tian thinkers, and these not all of mediaeval 
days, have been able to offer to men only the 
expected joy of an anticipated future life 
to reconcile them to the inexplicable misery 
of the present life. 

The contention is here made that the sub- 
stitution of a promised future happiness for 

[128] 



SATISFYING JOY 



a demanded present happiness is a confes- 
sion of the inefficiency of Christ's reUgion, 
and is in fact an evasion of Christian re- 
sponsibiHty. If men cannot find satisfying 
joy now, they cannot reasonably expect 
any satisfjang joy by and by. If God in 
this world has been so overcome by any 
spirit of evil that He cannot here make His 
children happy, we have no ground for be- 
lieving that He will be any more powerful 
in any world to come. If God in this 
world, which is admittedly His, will not 
make His children happy now, we cannot 
credit any greater willingness on His part 
for the future existence. There cannot be 
two Gods — one to rule upon the earth, and 
one to rule in Heaven — and it is high time 
that Christian people should cease talking 
and acting as though they believed such an 
absurdity. 

Is there joy in the religion of Jesus Christ 
which can satisfy those who have the God- 
given right to the pursuit of happiness in 
this world as we know it to-day — this world 
of sorrow and of suffering and of sin? 
9 [ 129 ] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



That is one of the most persistent questions 
which concern the efficiency of the Christian 
religion. Countless multitudes are await- 
ing the answer, multitudes of the miserable 
and the disappointed and the disheartened 
children of God. They stand before us 
with bent bodies, with careworn faces, their 
eyes wet with tears or hardened with hope- 
lessness, and with uplifted, pleading hands 
they cry, "Give us the joy that no man can 
take away from us." And what shall be 
the Christian's answer to these souls plead- 
ing only for what is theirs by divine birth- 
right? 

Let the answer to this demand of unhappy 
souls be spoken in the words of no other 
than the Master Himself. *'Your joy will 
be full," He said to His disciples, "when 
my joy is in you." 

His joy! What did Jesus mean? Tra- 
dition has appropriated the words of the 
Second Isaiah as descriptive of this Saviour 
of the world, "A Man of sorrows and ac- 
quainted with grief." Christian art has 
painted the Christ with sad, unsmiling face. 
[ 130 ] 



SATISFYING JOY 



But Jesus pictured Himself as the Man of 
Joy. He spoke of that joy as something 
so real, so abiding, so satisfying that the 
possession of it by others could be described 
only as the very fullness of joy. Whence 
the apparent discrepancy? 

A casual review of the biography of 
Jesus would seem to indicate that tradition 
and art had been right in their picture of the 
Man of Sorrows. We read that He was 
born of poor parents and that He had not 
where to lay His head ; that He was tempted 
in the wilderness and tried in the garden of 
Gethsemane ; that His body was wearied by 
His ceaseless ministry, and that His soul 
was sickened by men's hardness of heart; 
that He was betrayed by one of His house- 
hold of disciples, denied with oaths by an- 
other, and deserted by them all ; that He was 
made the butt of the cruel horseplay of 
rough soldiers; that He was crucified in the 
company of criminals; and that even in the 
agony of His dying hours His countrymen 
for whom His loving heart yearned, passed 
by the foot of the cross, wagging their heads 

[ 131 ] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



and reviling Him. Surely if any man was 
ever acquainted with grief it was this lonely, 
rejected, crucified Son of Man. 

But delve deeper into the biography of 
the Saviour. Read between the lines. Find 
the spirit that sustained Him. Study this 
life not as it was seen by others, but as it 
was experienced by Himself. When we 
try to catch something of the deep, spiritual 
significance of that life, we read something 
like this. He was born of good parents who 
loved Him. He became early conscious of 
His filial relations with the eternal God. 
He resisted the temptation in the wilderness 
and overcame the weakness in Gethsemane. 
He knew the inner spirit of willingness of 
those who were weak in the flesh and slow of 
understanding. He made the maimed to 
walk and the blind to see, and to the sinful 
He gave hope and courage. He was con- 
scious of the remorse of Judas, the quick 
penitence of Peter, and He could hope for 
the restoration of the faith of those disciples 
who for a time had distrusted and deserted 
Him. No mockery of homage could de- 

[ 132 ] 



SATISFYING JOY 



stroy within Him the sense of the worthiness 
of real homage, and the cross on Calvary 
was to Him but the place where He could 
happily say that His work, the faithful 
performance of God's will, was finished. 
Surely no man had ever such cause for joy 
as this Son of God who had overcome temp- 
tation in Himself, who had served and saved 
His fellow-men, and who had finished the 
work God had given Him to do. 

This brief review of the life of the Man 
for whom joy was a real possession in spite 
of His acquaintance with grief, suggests to 
us that the real and lasting joy of life is 
something independent of all outside con- 
ditions. 

If we should limit the use of the word 
"happiness" to its derivative significance, 
and define the word as the pleasure derived 
from favourable happenings, then we must 
admit that the religion of this Man promises 
happiness to His followers only incidentally. 
Primarily, Christ's religion cannot be ex- 
pected to smooth the waters of the troublous 
sea of life. But it does something more 
[133] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



and better than this. It supplies the bal- 
last which enables one to sail serenely 
through the troubled seas. 

When we take "joy" from its derivation 
to signify an exultant leaping forth of the 
spirit, and when we modify the word with 
due reference to Christ's own joy by the 
adjective Christian, we have for our defini- 
tion of Christian joy the following: Chris- 
tian joy is the Christlike consciousness of 
victory over self, of service for others, and 
of harmony with the will of God. The pos- 
session of such joy will not make the sea of 
life all smooth, but it will make all the angry 
waves surmountable. It will create the hap- 
piness of external conditions not so much by 
ameliorating the unfavourable conditions, 
as by minimizing their untoward influence. 

It is pitiably true that many men, per- 
haps most men, are pursuing happiness by 
the futile method of the attempt to smooth 
the sea. They demand that the conditions 
shall be made favourable for them. They 
expect ease and luxury and idleness. The 
true Christian method of the pursuit of hap- 
[134] 



SATISFYING JOY 



piness is the method of overcoming the 
rouglmess of the sea by an increase of bal- 
last. If the tempestuous waves of sorrow 
and of disappointment are in danger of 
overwhelming one, the sure way to decrease 
their violence is to increase one's own stabil- 
ity. It is only the small, unballasted craft 
that feels the high seas and the adverse 
winds. The great, heavily ballasted ocean 
liners are unmoved by the sea's roughness. 

The only joy that can really satisfy is 
this joy of the greatness of personality. 
The three elements in the attainment of such 
greatness are the elements of victory over 
one's self, of service for others, and of obe- 
dience to God. This is the trinity of joy — 
the joy of self-mastery, the joy of brotherly 
love, and the joy of filial obedience. And 
this is the Christian joy, for this was the 
joy of Christ. 

If we are forced to admit that only Christ 
Himself ever perfectly attained the great- 
ness of personality which alone could make 
His joy full, we must yet declare that the 
approach to the fullness of joy is by the one 
[135] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



way of this Victor's attainment. We must 
understand that when Jesus expressed His 
wish that His joy might be in His disciples, 
He was wishing for them the same kind of 
a Hfe of self-mastery, of service, and of 
obedience which He Himself had lived. 

So when these multitudes of God's chil- 
dren, who by the divine right of their in- 
heritance should be happy, but who are not, 
come to the Christian teacher with stream- 
ing eyes and trembling lips, asking for the 
joy that satisfies, this must be the Christian's 
answer: "Such joy, dear suffering, disap- 
pointed friend, you can have if you will 
seek it in the right direction." Has your 
unhappiness come as the inevitable result of 
sinful indulgence? Your joy will be re- 
stored when with God's promised help you 
have overcome the temptation and mastered 
yourself. Has your unhappiness come as 
the result of selfishness? You will find 
joy again by the way of the helpful 
service of love. Are your eyes wet with 
tears because of disappointment and of 
bereavement? Ah, here is the promise of 
[136] 



SATISFYING JOY 



the joy that can sustain even in these un- 
toward and humanly inexphcable conditions. 
It hes in trustful obedience to the will of the 
Father, who knows and who cares. 

But when all is said to the unhappy soul 
that the Christian can say, there will be a 
remainder of inexplicable and seemingly ir- 
removable unhappiness, so long as the life 
of each individual is closely associated mth 
the lives of all other individuals, and so long 
as there remain in the world some children 
of God who do not try to overcome their 
sins and their selfishness, and who are not 
endeavouring to fulfill in themselves the will 
of God for them. Vicarious unhappiness! 
The world seems full of it. Unhappy par- 
ents, unhappy husbands and wives, unhappy 
children, unhappy friends, sorrowing, griev- 
ing, suffering for the sins and selfishness 
and wilfulness of others. Can the religion 
of Jesus remove this unhappiness? Only 
by the way of a Calvary. Like Jesus 
Christ Himself, no follower of Jesus in this 
world of ignorance and of selfishness and of 
sin can expect to be other than "acquainted 

[137] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



with grief." But like Jesus, every Chris- 
tian who is strong enough to take up his own 
cross can find, aye, will find, joy in the very 
suffering of sacrifice. 

Here, then, is the satisfying joy offered 
to men by fellowship with the spirit of Jesus 
Christ, the joy of self-mastery, the joy 
of loving service, the joy of the fullfilment 
of God's will. That was the joy of Christ. 
That is the joy of every one who is truly 
trying to follow Jesus. That can be the 
joy of all who will fight and serve and obey. 



[138] 



ATTAINABLE PEACE 



CHAPTER NINE 



" My peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you : not 
as the world giveth, give I unto you." — John 14 : 27. 



ATTAINABLE PEACE 

No THOUGHTFUL student of the life of 
Jesus can fail to notice the apparent contra- 
diction of His utterances concerning peace. 
At one time, quite early in His ministry, He 
distinctly declares: "I came not to send 
peace, but a sword. For I am come to set 
a man at variance against his father, and 
the daughter against her mother, and the 
daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; 
and a man's foes shall be they of his own 
household." (Matt. 10: 34-36.) But when 
we turn the pages of the narrative to the 
very end of His life, we find in the last ad- 
dress to His disciples the promise of this 
bequest : "Peace I leave with you. My peace 
I give unto you. Not as the world giveth, 
give I unto you." (John 14:25.) 

There are several ways by which we may 
seek escape from the difficulty of this seem- 
ing contradiction. We may say, as some 
[ 141 ] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



have said, that the same word is used in its 
different connections with very different 
meanings, that the peace which Jesus de- 
nied to be the result of His ministry is the 
peace of an outer social harmony, and that 
the peace which He bequeathed His disciples 
is the peace of an inner personal repose. 
History has seemed to substantiate the 
truth that the religion of Jesus, with its va- 
rious and sometimes antagonistic interpreta- 
tions, has not always tended towards social 
harmony. At the same time, the testimony 
of the saints of all ages has been to the 
effect that their faith in Christ has produced 
a personal and an indwelling peace. Thus 
Christians who have been cast away by their 
family, ostracized by their friends, and ex- 
communicated by the Church, have gone 
jubilantly to their martyrdom, testifying to 
the possession of the inner peace. While 
other Christians, fighting not only against 
the manifold evil of the world, but quarrel- 
ing with their very brethren in Christ over 
matters of theology and speculation, from 
time to time have paused in their wordy 
[142] 



ATTAINABLE PEACE 



battles and their disgraceful squabbles to 
speak triumphantly of the peace of God in 
their own hearts. Perhaps Jesus meant that 
His religion could bring to men objectively 
only conflict, and that it could give to them 
peace only as a subjective experience. 

Or we might seek to reconcile the diverse 
statements of Jesus, as others have done, by 
reference to the different times when the 
statements were uttered. We might inter- 
pret Him to mean that the beginning of the 
Christian life is tempestuous, that its con- 
tinuance in this world of trouble and of sin 
must be with combat, and that peace can 
come only at the very end of life as we know 
it here. There are doubtless many toiling, 
struggling, troubled Christians who in this 
conception try to content themselves with 
the mere hope of a peace that shall be theirs 
when they are ready to die. 

Each of these explanations, however, de- 
stroys something of the efficiency of the 
religion of Jesus. Subjective experiences 
may be more valuable to their possessor than 
corresponding objective experiences, but 
[143] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



they certainly are not of great value to 
others. It surely is better for a company 
of men to dwell together in harmony, than 
it is for each member of a quarreling and 
disputing company to be possessed of a 
mere subjective equipoise. And unless the 
religion of Jesus can stop the objective 
quarreling, the world, as a whole, will be 
but shghtly impressed by personal testi- 
monies to subjective peace. 

Again, the efficiency of the religion of 
Jesus is immeasurably decreased by any and 
all attempts to postpone the blessings of 
that religion to some future time. It has 
been the great source of weakness in Christ's 
religion that for nearly twenty centuries the 
most of its blessings have been relegated to 
an eternal future. Really, the present is as 
much a part of eternity as any future can 
be. Men are not suddenly changed into 
immortal beings when they die, or when they 
are about to die; they were all created im- 
mortal beings when they were born. The 
present belongs to God as well as the fu- 
ture. And unless it can be demonstrated 

[ 144 ] 



ATTAINABLE PEACE 



that there is an inevitable disconnection be- 
tween God's present and God's future, we 
must necessarily demand a present as well 
as a future realization of the peaceful con- 
dition of life with God. We may not rea- 
sonably demand that the blessing of peace 
shall be as fully appreciated now as we hope 
it may be by and by, for the present ap- 
preciation of the blessing depends upon our 
mortal limitations. But in so far as we, in 
our immaturity, are now able to accept the 
blessings of peace, in so far must we believe 
that exactly the same kind of peace may be 
ours with God to-day as can possibly be 
ours when we come to die, or even after we 
are dead. The peace of the God who is the 
God of the living, must be a present peace. 
The logic of this course of reasoning com- 
pels the conclusion that the apparent dis- 
crepancy in Christ's teachings concerning 
peace is due only to the different degrees of 
men's acceptance of peace. It was not 
Christ's fault that the immediate result of 
the entrance into this world of His evangel 
should be conflict. The conflict was caused 

[ 145 ] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



by the unwillingness, or, if one prefers, the 
inability of men to receive that which He 
was offering them. There is nothing that 
makes a company of angry, quarreling men 
more angry and more quarrelsome still than 
the unsought and unwelcome attempt to 
pacify them. Christ's offer of peace has 
been and always will be an apple of discord 
to those who do not want peace at His pro- 
posed terms. 

And by the same token Christ's offer of 
peace cannot be expected to become com- 
pulsorily operative in the lives of all men 
at any particular future time. His peace 
will become operative in the life of each 
man when, and only when each man becomes 
ready to accept the terms of the offer. 

There is, then, no discrepancy in the teach- 
ings of Jesus concerning the object of His 
ministry. He came to offer to men the 
peace of God, subjectively to bring to each 
man the inner quietude of trust and con- 
fidence, and objectively to bring them all 
into harmonious social relations with each 
other. His offer is as available for this 
[146] 



ATTAINABLE PEACE 



present moment as it can be for any ex- 
pected future moment. His offer creates 
discord only when it is rejected. The 
sword will be sheathed and the differences 
forgotten when the offer is accepted. 

No one can accuse Jesus of arbitrariness 
because the bequest of His last will and tes- 
tament is thus seen to be conditional. Ar- 
tificial conditions may be imposed by men 
only in the bequest of artificial property. 
The testator, for instance, may impose any 
condition he pleases upon the bestowal of 
his money and his real estate. These are 
extraneous things, things which exist apart 
from the testator's own personality. But 
there are many things which every man must 
bequeath to his successors without condition. 
Something of his own disposition, for ex- 
ample, he must bequeath to his children ; cer- 
tain good or evil effects from his life he 
must leave to his friends and acquaintances. 
And there are some things which every man 
may include in his bequests whose ap- 
propriation is essentially conditioned by 
the very nature of the things bequeathed. 

[147] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



Thus real success may be bequeathed 
by a father to his son only on the es^ 
sential condition of the son's industry and 
perseverance. So the father's strength of 
character will become, by inheritance, the 
possession of the son only as the son imi- 
tates his father's example in the resistance 
of temptation and in the practice of self- 
control. The successful man and the strong 
man bequeath to their children an incentive 
to success and to strength, and the example 
of success and of strength, but the bequests 
do not and cannot become available unless 
the incentive empowers imitation. 

The bequest of peace by Jesus must be 
catalogued in the last mentioned list of be- 
queathable possessions. The condition of 
its inheritance is contained in the very nature 
of the thing bequeathed. It was really only 
the incentive to peace, and the pathway to 
peace which Jesus left to His disciples. 
These were all that He could leave them. 
The peace itself could not become the full 
possession of anyone of these disciples ex- 
cept the inducement of Jesus should lead 

[ 148 ] 



ATTAINABLE PEACE 



him to follow his Master on the charted way 
to peace. 

The essential condition then to the full 
possession of the peace which was Christ's 
last bequest, not only to His immediate dis- 
ciples, but to all His followers, is the Christ- 
induced imitation of the Christ way of the 
attainment of peace. Jesus attained peace 
by the two pathways of trust and love. By 
trust in God He came into that peace which 
is the subjective experience of calmness and 
repose. By love for His fellow-men He 
came into that peace which is the objective 
condition of harmony with His fellow-men. 
When men have been induced by Jesus, both 
to trust their God and to love their fellows, 
they have come into the possession of His 
bequest of peace. 

Only one part of the peace promised by 
Jesus is subjective. The subjective Chris- 
tian peace is the repose of trust. Some- 
times this peace has been mistaken for the 
rest of cessation of labour and of temp- 
tation. Such rest, which means the absence 
of toil and of conflict, is as foreign to 

[149] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



the religion of Jesus as it is foreign to 
the idea of the development of manhood 
and of womanhood. When one turns to 
the religion of Jesus for relief from any of 
the developing experiences of life, one will 
always be disappointed. Religion is not a 
substitute for human development; it is a 
means to that development. So instead of 
the rest of absence from toil and conflict we 
must expect the personal experience of peace 
to give us something of more worth, namely, 
an equanimity in toil and a repose in con- 
flict. 

The peace of Jesus subjectively con- 
sidered is the equanimity and the repose 
which enables one to do efficiently the work 
of life and to meet victoriously the temp- 
tations of life. Certainly this peace will 
make the toil apparently less arduous, and 
the temptations seemingly less strenuous. 
The man of mental equipoise can always ac- 
complish a given task with much less effort 
than that needed by the irritable, impatient 
man; and he who meets temptation with an 
inner repose, in the assurance of God-em- 
[ 150 ] 



ATTAINABLE PEACE 



powered victory, must ever, by this sure 
armour of defence, diminish the force of the 
temptation. It is a terrible thing for any 
man to have no work to do in the world ; and 
no enemy could wish a man any greater 
harm than the removal from his life of all 
temptation. But it is a splendid thing for 
any man to be able to do his work easily; 
and the best friend of that man can wish 
him no greater blessing than the power to 
resist. The indwelling peace of the religion 
of Jesus is the bequest to every man from 
every man's best Friend. This peace creates 
the ability to perform with comparative ease 
the hardest tasks. It creates the power to 
resist the severest temptation. Surely no 
single equipment for efficient life can be 
worth more to its possessor than Christian 
peace in the heart. 

This helpful equipment for life is born 
of implicit trust in God. It comes to men 
as the bequest of Jesus because Jesus re- 
vealed to men God's trustworthiness. He 
who really like Christ and through Christ 
comes securely to rely upon his Father's 
[151] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



love, comes into the peace which enables ef- 
ficient toil and which empowers victory, the 
peace, in short, which energizes and ennobles 
hfe. 

There is a certain sense, however, in 
which the possession of the inner peace of 
trust is but a means to an end. The end 
towards which the efficiency of individuals 
must contribute is the objective peace of 
social harmony. "That all may be one," 
was the way Jesus described the complete, 
desired end of His ministry. Not just that 
some men might have the indwelhng peace 
of trust, but that all men might dwell to- 
gether in the outer peace of harmony. 

It is easy to misunderstand the nature 
of this outer peace. Social harmony has 
evidently been thought by some to be syn- 
onymous with the eradication of all social 
differences. But in religion and in society, 
as well as in music, there is a vast difference 
between the meaning of the words unison 
and harmony. It would be the worst im- 
aginable catastrophe to the world if all dif- 
ferences between individual tastes and be- 

[152] 



ATTAINABLE PEACE 



liefs and practices should be obliterated. A 
unison of all the members of society would 
destroy personal ambition and personal re- 
sponsibility, and society thus would become 
not a living organism, but an inert, lifeless 
instrument. The music of humanity must 
be played upon living personalities, not 
upon soulless mechanisms. It is a music 
comparable to the oratorio rendered by hu- 
man voices, and not to the single note of 
insensate instruments all attuned to the same 
pitch. 

The cause of the discord, which is observ- 
able in society, is not too much individuality, 
but too little sympathy. Each member or 
class of society is too prone to ignore the 
essential relations to other members or 
classes. Thus industry, which for its best 
efficiency requires the harmony of capital 
and labour, is made inefficient by the jang- 
ling discord of each party's insistence 
upon just its own rights. So the re- 
ligious efficiency of the world which re- 
quires the harmony of different beliefs 
and practices is made inefficient by the 

[153] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



discord of different creeds and different 
rituals, each struggling vociferously to 
drown the sound of all the others. 

What the religion of Jesus can do for 
men is this — not to make them all think and 
act alike, but to make them all sympathetic 
and tolerant. It can bring to each indi- 
vidual the recognition of the worth of all 
other individuals. It can take away the dis- 
cord of the insistence of each individual's 
necessary note and bring all the notes not 
into unison, but into harmony. 

The way Christ's religion can bring men 
into this outer peace of harmony is by way 
of obedience to His love. When men come 
really to love one another, in any degree 
like the manner of His love for them, the 
difference between individuals will be as 
marked as it is now. The responsibility of 
each individual for his own part in the ora- 
torio of humanity will remain the same. 
There will be no unison of voices singing 
the same words and the same notes. There 
will be the different words and the different 
notes, but the differences by the magic of 
[154] 



ATTAINABLE PEACE 



directing love will be softened into exquis- 
ite harmony. And the theme of the ora- 
torio which men will sing in one grand 
chorus will be, "Peace on earth, good will 
to men." 



[155] 



ACHIEVING POWER 



CHAPTER TEN 



" Verily, verily, I say unto you. He that believeth on me, 
the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than 
these shall he do." — John 14 : 12. 



ACHIEVING POWER 

In Christ's brief parable concerning the 
merchantman seeking goodly pearls, the 
great Teacher does not specify exactly what 
"the pearl of great price" represents. He 
has been generally understood, however, to 
refer to the inestimable value of personal 
salvation. This somewhat vague and often 
misunderstood term is a sufficient descrip- 
tion of the "pearl" only when we under- 
stand by the term all that Jesus evidently 
meant to convey by its use. 

Personal salvation, according to Jesus, 
is personal development for service. It in- 
cludes, therefore, all those processes of ed- 
ucation and of discipline and of exercise 
which help in the creation of character and 
of efficiency. The chief value of personal 
salvation thus defined lies not in what may 
result to the saved man himself, but in what 
through his salvation must result to others. 
[159] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



If this "jewel" be kept hidden in its indi- 
vidual case it may, indeed, give a certain 
satisfaction to the owner of a miserly dis- 
position, but the real value of the "jewel" 
consists in its power to beautify and to 
adorn. If the saved man would make his 
"jewel" really valuable, he must wear it con- 
tinually. He must use his "jewel" in such 
a way as to make himself more attractive 
to others, more attractive and so more win- 
some and more serviceable. 

In the discussion of the values of the 
Christian religion we have come at the very 
last to the consideration of that value which 
of them all is the most priceless. We are 
to think now not of any personal satisfac- 
tion which may and must come to him who 
embraces the religion of Jesus, but of the 
personal power that must be his. Health, 
forgiveness, strength, joy, consolation, and 
peace — these are all pearls of value, and 
it would be worth one's while to try to be a 
Christian just for these and the like per- 
sonal satisfactions. But "the pearl of 
great price" is nothing less than the personal 
[160] 



ACHIEVING POWEft 



power of the Christian, which is to be esti- 
mated not at all in terms of his own satis- 
faction, but always in terms of his service 
for others. 

The power of the Christian life is derived 
from two sources. It comes in part from 
the energizing of one's own resident but 
latent forces, and in part from the superhu- 
man force which is the result of the union 
of the Christian with the omnipotent power 
of God. 

In the first place, the Christian religion 
furnishes the dynamic of latent, unused hu- 
man forces. Our best method of approach 
to the understanding of this truth is by way 
of illustration. 

In the early morning after the terrible 
disaster which destroyed so great a part of 
the city of San Francisco, a man was rush- 
ing frantically about in the vicinity of his 
devastated home. He was searching among 
the debris for his missing child. Suddenly 
he stopped and put his hand to his ear. He 
had heard a faint cry coming to him from 
beneath a pile of torn lumber, overthrown 

1 161 ] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



bricks, and shattered mortar. A moment 
later the man was feverishly throwing aside 
the heavy pieces of refuse, digging down 
in the direction of the summoning cry for 
help. Soon he came to a heavy beam. 

"Wait a minute!" sang out an approach- 
ing officer; "You cannot lift that alone.'* 
But the man did not wait. Before the of- 
ficer could reach him he bent his puny back 
to the apparently impossible task, and the 
heavy weight moved. The imprisoned child 
crawled out to safety. And the man, with 
his dear one clasped in his arms, sank doMTi 
upon the mass of debris and sobbed his 
thanksgiving. 

But how could he move the weight that 
was apparently too heavy for the strength 
of two ordinary men? The evident answer 
is this. The love of his child empowered 
him. 

Consider another illustration. Turn back 
the pages of the history of the American 
nation nearly one hundred and fifty years. 
Look at the picture of the distraught colo- 
nies waiting for the voice that should arouse 

[ 162 ] 



ACHIEVING POWER 



them to united action in resistance to the 
oppression of the mother country. The 
first Congress had already met and had 
accomphshed nothing. Massachusetts and 
the other northern colonies were waiting for 
Virginia to take the lead, and Virginia was 
waiting for the man who would speak the 
word to inspire her action. 

It was in St. John's Church, Richmond, 
at the meeting of the new Virginia Conven- 
tion, that the word was spoken. There were 
wealthier men in that Convention than the 
speaker, men more highly educated than he, 
men who were destined to play a seemingly 
more important part in the coming struggle 
for independence. But when Patrick 
Henry had finished his impassioned ora- 
tion, declaring that "An appeal to arms and 
to the God of hosts is all that is left to 
us," a human voice had spoken the words 
which touched with fire the waiting fuse of 
American patriotism, and the fire did not 
go out until Cornwallis had surrendered at 
Yorktown. 

But whence the power in the words of this 

[ 163 ] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



comparatively uneducated lawyer? Again 
the answer is evident. He was empowered 
by the love of his country. 

These illustrations from the many that 
might be enumerated, must suffice. They 
are examples of the power of a selfless de- 
votion to energize unused and quiescent 
forces. Most men probably never use more 
than a fraction of the force which is resi- 
dent in themselves, because to most there 
never comes the necessary dynamic to action. 
So an emergency call always finds a man 
with more strength than he really knew he 
possessed. Under the impetus of a sudden 
and pressing need, the forces of the man — 
physical, mental, and moral — are apparently 
wonderfully multiplied. In reality, his 
forces are not multiplied at all, but his un- 
used forces are made operative. He is, as 
we say, "carried out of himself" by the call 
of some one else's danger or need, and in 
self-forgetfulness he is able to lift the 
heavy weight, to speak the inspiring word, 
to perform the needed service. Unselfish 
devotion is the dynamic which can call into 

[164] 



ACHIEVING POWER 



efficient action every atom of a man's in- 
herent capability. 

This is the dynamic furnished by the re- 
ligion of Jesus. The Christian hears the 
words of his Teacher telling him that God 
loves him. He hears Christ declare that 
God loves all other men, too. He hears God 
through Jesus, in accents of tenderest pity, 
calling for the stronger and more fortunate 
of His children to help those who are weaker 
and less fortunate. 

Here is a man in need. He is ignorant. 
He is sick. He is morally incapable. He 
is wilfully sinful. He is exactly hke that 
child beneath the debris of the San Fran- 
cisco earthquake. He is incompetent and 
inefficient, and because of his incompetence 
and inefficiency, he is in imminent danger. 
Now, the rehgion of Jesus declares that 
every other man is bound to this one man in 
danger by the ties of relationship in the 
family of God. God loves that man in 
danger. So, too, if we have recognized our 
relationship to God, do we love him. When 
that truth really grips our hearts, when we 

[165] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



come to know that it is our brother and 
God's child who is in this danger, then in 
self-forgetful love we bend our backs to 
the task of his salvation, and lo, the devo- 
tion of our love energizes us and makes us 
efficient. 

Or here is a whole class of people in need. 
This class is exposed to disease-infected 
conditions. This other class is the victim of 
the oppression of iniquitous industrial con- 
ditions. This third class is enslaved by 
tyrannous political conditions. Christ's re- 
ligion teaches that these classes of people, 
like every individual in every class, belong to 
the one family of God. God loves these 
people, and by the same token He hates the 
untoward conditions which threaten and op- 
press and enslave them. The love of God 
is here demanding that the destructive con- 
ditions shall be removed. The disease germs 
must be annihilated. Iniquity in industry 
must be vanquished. Slavery in govern- 
ment must be abolished. Our brethren, all 
of them God's children, are waiting inertly 
for the leader who shall incite them to a 
[ 166 ] 



ACHIEVING POWER 



united effort for their own deliverance. 
Let a man really come to feel this truth and 
he will open his mouth to speak the protest- 
ing and defiant words; and lo, his selfless 
devotion to the cause of the oppressed so 
empowers his efforts that he becomes en- 
abled to lead his fellow-men into liberty. 
Thus are reformers always created, and the 
religion of Jesus has done very little for any 
man until it has made him a reformer, until 
it has aroused in his bosom a Christlike anger 
against injustice and abuse, until it has en- 
gendered within him the self- forgetful cour- 
age of the bold championship of the cause 
of the oppressed. 

The religion of Jesus fires a man's heart, 
stiffens his backbone, strengthens his sinews, 
and empowers his efficiency. Such an one 
no longer stops to say "I can't," but with 
Paul he is always ready to declare that 
through the dynamic of the spirit of the 
loving, serving Christ, "I can." 

But there is something more which the re- 
ligion of Jesus can do for any man. It can 
give to him the control of a power outside 

C 167 ] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



himself, a power which we can describe with 
no other word than that of superhuman. 

When Jesus was preparing His disciples 
for His approaching death, according to the 
narrative of the Fourth Gospel, He declared 
that after His departure they would do 
greater things than He Himself had accom- 
pKshed. We are not to understand by the 
"greater works" that He meant that His 
disciples were to perform deeds more mirac- 
ulous than His own. The greatness of even 
Christ's works did not consist in their mi- 
raculousness, but in their beneficence. His 
declaration concerning the "greater works" 
of the disciples was the promise of the en- 
largement of His work to the accomplish- 
ment of a wider beneficence. The disciples' 
service for the world would be greater than 
His, not because they could be really greater 
men than He had been, but because they 
would have the greater efficiency which His 
greatness had made possible. 

The scientific achievements of modern 
times furnish us with many illustrative par- 
allels to this spiritual truth spoken by Jesus. 

[168] 



ACHIEVING POWER 



We consider only one. Doubtless we all 
should admit that the original discoverer of 
the power of steam must be ranked as 
greater than all succeeding investigators 
in this line of physical demonstration. But 
just because of the revelation of this first 
great man the succeeding men, by the use 
of the revealed power, have really accom- 
plished much greater works. We cannot 
truly say that James Watt made the mod- 
ern, gigantic, and powerful locomotive, but 
Watt gave to the world the initial revela- 
tion which made the locomotive possible. 

Now Jesus stands in the world of moral 
achievement as does the discoverer and first 
exponent of physical forces in the world of 
scientific achievements. Jesus was the re- 
vealer to men of the power of love. He 
did not come into the world just to show 
men what love could do for them, but to 
demonstrate to them what they could do 
through love. By His revelation and ex- 
emphfication He gave to men what really 
proved to be a new moral and spiritual force. 
By no means did He Himself accomplish 
[169] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



the very last thing which that force could 
accomplish. He left to others to carry on 
His work of revelation and exemplification 
by new methods of application. These 
others, through the new power which He 
had revealed and inaugurated were, accord- 
ing to His program, to do even greater 
things than He had been able to accomplish 
— greater in extent, not greater in content, 
greater in the farther reaching results of a 
continually widening application of the new 
power. 

The history of the development of Christ's 
religion is proving the truth that Christ's 
astounding promise is becoming fulfilled. 
Compute, if you will, the "greater works" 
by the numbers influenced. Peter, on the 
day of Pentecost, made more converts to 
the religion of Jesus than his Master Him- 
self had made during all the years of His 
ministry. And to-day there are preachers 
and evangelists who are influencing more 
people than Peter was able to do. The fol- 
lowers of Jesus, at the time of His death, 
numbered at most but a few hundred, per- 

[ 170 ] 



ACHIEVING POWER 



haps not so many as one hundred. To-day 
we must estimate the followers of Christ 
with the million as our unit of numeration. 

Or estimate, if you choose, the "greater 
works" of the followers of Christ by the 
geographical extent of the out-reach of His 
religion. Paul carried the gospel into re- 
gions which Jesus never attempted to visit. 
And the modern missionary successors of 
Paul are successfully promulgating Christ's 
religion in lands wholly unknown to the 
"Apostle to the Gentiles." The provinces 
of Judea and of Galilee were the scene of 
Christ's ministry. The entire world has be- 
come the scene of the labours of His fol- 
lowers. 

Or value the "greater works" of Christ's 
disciples by the increasing variety of the ap- 
plications of the principles which He incul- 
cated and exemplified. Jesus made but 
little, if any, attempt to apply the moral 
power of love to social, industrial, and po- 
litical conditions. He was apparently not 
interested in the subject of the public edu- 
cation of the youth, nor in the settlement of 

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EFFICIENT RELIGION 



labour disputes, nor in the establishment of a 
just and righteous government. Even His 
concern with men's bodies was limited to the 
cure of isolated cases of sickness and did not 
extend to any attempt to prevent disease. 
But the followers of Jesus now are applying 
His revealed power to all sorts of prob- 
lems, problems which Jesus Himself seemed 
not to recognize. By attention to hygiene, 
they are making absolutely impossible some 
of the diseases which were in sporadic in- 
stances only cured by Jesus. By the 
maintenance of schools and colleges and 
endowed libraries, the modern disciples 
of Jesus are preventing many forms 
of sin which Jesus only occasionally 
forgave. By the introduction of the 
principle of brotherhood into industry 
and into politics, these later followers of 
Jesus are making impossible the oppression 
of the poor and the unfortunate, whereas 
Jesus Himself was content with but one 
exhibition of the holy wrath of love, when 
He overthrew the tables of the greedy 
grafters in the temple of the living God. 
[172] 



ACHIEVING POWER 



Jesus rescued an occasional individual from 
some of the effects of ignorance and disease 
and sin. The followers of Jesus are keep- 
ing whole classes, whole nations, one might 
almost say the whole world from ignorance 
and from disease, from crime and from sin- 
fulness. 

If some of these "greater works," per- 
haps all of them, are being accomplished to- 
day by scientific methods which are compre- 
hensible to the human intellect, their great- 
ness is not thereby diminished one whit. To 
help any man in any of his actual needs is 
great work, however that help may be ac- 
complished. The "greater works" prom- 
ised by Jesus are the applications of His re- 
vealed moral power of love to more people, 
to a wider field, and to a greater variety of 
activities. The "greater works" are pos- 
sible because of the greatness of Christ's in- 
itial revelation. That the work, in its ex- 
tent, must be greater than Christ's, is inevi- 
table because the power which He revealed 
was a living, divine power, and therefore its 
fruits must grow. 

[173] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



We must not hesitate in our description 
of this power, revealed in its fullness by 
Jesus and by Him made available to men. 
It is a superhuman power. By this we can- 
not mean that it is a miraculous power, nor 
even a supernatural power. But it is super- 
human. It is a power outside and above 
the man himself, a power greater than any 
potency which can be energized into his own 
latent capabilities. 

We have reached the limit of man's unas- 
sisted power, however disinterested may be 
his energizing motive, long before we have 
reached the end of his possible achievements. 
A man under the stress of an imperative 
call of love may lift a much greater weight 
than he could possibly lift without that em- 
powering incentive. But, after all, he can 
lift much more by the intelligent use of the 
steam derrick. When he uses the steam 
derrick, he is utilizing a power of God which 
is superhuman. That a man who is en- 
dowed with the spirit of Jesus should be 
able to accomplish results utterly impossible 
to him without Christ's spirit, is no more 

[174] 



ACHIEVING POWER 



miraculous or supernatural than that a man, 
by the use of the steam derrick, can utilize 
a power superhuman. We must consider 
the spiritual power of divine love in the 
world to be as natural as the physical 
power of what we call natural forces. 
And we must note that the great results 
which have been accomplished by men 
inspired by love are explicable only on 
the assumption that they have been using 
love's steam derrick. Their selfless devotion 
has enabled them to use a power divine. 
The power of their human endeavour has 
been multiplied by the power of God's om- 
nipotence, and lo! the "greater works" have 
been accomplished. 

Now if this omnipotent, divine power of 
the love of God, like all other powers of 
God, be a real and a natural power, it must 
be reducible to certain definite and com- 
prehensible laws. There must be a way by 
which any man can avail himself of this 
superhuman power just as there is a way 
by which he can avail himself of the super- 
human power of steam or of electricity. 

[175] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



The way marked out by Jesus is the way 
of fellowship with His ideals. He Himself 
was the Way, He declared on one occasion 
— the Way and the Truth and the Life. 
By this we must understand Him to mean 
that anyone who would accept His truth 
and live His life must, by that way, come 
into possession of His power. 

To be more explicit, to accept the truth 
in Christ is to accept not merely in an in- 
tellectual sense, but in an ethical sense the 
truth of the Fatherhood of God, with all 
its implications of the brotherhood of men, 
and of love's compulsion to service. To 
live Christ's life means the attempt to serve 
and to save one's fellow-men by self-f orget- 
fulness and sacrifice. Given a man who 
will really take this truth of Christ into his 
life and try to live it, and you have a man 
who can no more avoid utilizing the super- 
human, divine power of love, than the man 
who has come into practical possession of 
the truths of physics can avoid utilizing 
superhuman and also divine power when he 
[ 176 ] 



ACHIEVING POWER 



controls a steam derrick or when he touches 
the electric button. 

That superhuman physical power can be 
used by man is a matter of fact which we 
observe every day in our lives. That super- 
human spiritual power can be used by man 
is not merely a truth to be logically deduced ; 
this also is a matter of fact. That all men 
may, if they will, use the power which some 
men are manifestly using, is a truth which 
cannot be denied except by the denial of 
the unity of God and of the inviolability of 
God's law. 

Achieving power! This is the promise 
of the Christian religion. And this is the 
end of the Christian religion, of which the 
consciousness of filial relation with God is 
only the beginning. 

The way of progress in Christ's religion 
is the way of faith in God and love for 
men. All along the way there will be 
brought to the traveler the blessings of for- 
giveness and of health, of consolation and 
of strength, of joy and of peace. 

[ 177 ] 



EFFICIENT RELIGION 



But no Christian can be content with any 
of these blessings which may come just to 
himself. The Christian has not come into 
possession of the great blessing promised 
by Christ's religion, the "pearl" of price- 
less value, until in the selfless devotion of 
his life his whole being becomes energized, 
until by the inevitableness of the operation 
of the laws of love he makes use of the 
very omnipotence of love for the accom- 
plishment of superhuman achievements, un- 
til he says, "In Christ's strengthening power 
I can," and until by the use of that power 
he achieves. 



1 178 ] 



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